The
interwall interactions in multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs),
which are associated with the number of walls and may vary even at
nanoscale, are important to investigate as they strongly influence
the optical properties of MWNTs. Interlayer interactions in a closely
related material, multilayered graphene, have been studied by Raman
spectroscopy, where the 2D-band Raman mode was used as the investigation
tool. However, this mode cannot be reliably utilized for MWNTs in
a similar fashion due to the structural difference between the two
materials. Here we demonstrate that unlike graphene, another Raman
mode, the D-band, which is conventionally known to represent localized
structural defects, can be activated by the interwall interactions
in a MWNT and thus can be used as an effective tool to investigate
interwall interactions in MWNTs. To study the interwall interactions
at nanoscale, we employed tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) and
experimentally confirmed that the D-band was actually strongly correlated
to the number of walls. We also interpreted the origin of this correlation
by numerical calculation, which takes into account both the exponentially
decaying intensity of the near-field light at the tip apex and the
nonlinear increase of sample volume as the number of walls increases.
Our findings pave ways to analyze interwall interactions in MWNTs
through TERS and can be applied for spectroscopic analysis of the
correlation between the optical signal and the topography for nanomaterials.