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Carbon nanotubes (CNT) hold enormous technological promise. It can only beharnessed if one controls in a practical way the CNT chirality, the feature ofthe tubular carbon topology that governs all the CNT properties---electronic,optical, mechanical. Experiments in catalytic growth over the last decade haverepeatedly revealed a puzzling strong preference towards minimally-chiral(near-armchair) CNT, challenging any existing hypotheses and turning chiralitycontrol ever more tantalizing yet leaving its understanding elusive. Here wecombine the CNT/catalyst interface thermodynamics with the kinetic growththeory to show that the unusual near-armchair peaks emerge from the twoantagonistic trends: energetic preference towards achiral CNT/catalystinterfaces vs. faster growth of chiral CNT. This narrow distribution isprofoundly related with the peaked behavior of a simple function, x*exp(-x).

Why do nanotubes grow chiral?