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Highly selective dispersion of single-walled carbon nanotubes using aromatic polymers

Nature Nanotechnology volume 2, pages 640–646 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Solubilizing and purifying carbon nanotubes remains one of the foremost technological hurdles in their investigation and application. We report a dramatic improvement in the preparation of single-walled carbon nanotube solutions based on the ability of specific aromatic polymers to efficiently disperse certain nanotube species with a high degree of selectivity. Evidence of this is provided by optical absorbance and photoluminescence excitation spectra, which show suspensions corresponding to up to ∼60% relative concentration of a single species of isolated nanotubes with fluorescence quantum yields of up to 1.5%. Different polymers show the ability to discriminate between nanotube species in terms of either diameter or chiral angle. Modelling suggests that rigid-backbone polymers form ordered molecular structures surrounding the nanotubes with n-fold symmetry determined by the tube diameter.

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Figure 1: Photoluminescence excitation maps of various polymer-SWNT samples in toluene solutions prepared using nanotubes grown by the HiPCO process as starting material.
Figure 2: Molecular mechanics simulations of the polymer wrapping mechanism.
Figure 3: Absorbance spectra comparing SWNTs from separate growth methods dispersed in aqueous SDBS surfactant solution (red and blue lines) and in toluene solutions of the polymer PFO (black lines).
Figure 4: Highly resolved PL and Raman spectra may also be obtained using PFO to solubilize SWNTs from the CoMoCAT process.
Figure 5: Graphene sheet maps showing normalized PL intensities for different solutions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Basic Technology Program of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for their financial support and C. Pears, in Biochemistry, at the University of Oxford for use of ultracentrifuge facilities. Jeong-Yuan Hwang would like to acknowledge the National Science Council of Taiwan and the Thousand Mile Horse Program for their financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK

    Adrian Nish, Jeong-Yuan Hwang, James Doig & Robin J. Nicholas

  2. Department of Material Science and Engineering and Centre for Condensed Matter Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jeong-Yuan Hwang

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  1. Adrian Nish
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  2. Jeong-Yuan Hwang
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  3. James Doig
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  4. Robin J. Nicholas
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Contributions

A.N. performed the data analysis and co-wrote the paper. J.-Y.H. prepared the samples and did the optical absorbance and PL measurements. J.D. carried out the computer simulations and took the Raman spectra. R.J.N. coordinated the project and co-wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robin J. Nicholas.

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Competing interests

We have applied for a British patent on 18 May 2007 entitled 'Method of carbon nanotube selection'. Some of the results and methods used in this paper were added to our patent filing.

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Supplementary figures S1-S3 (PDF 717 kb)

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Nish, A., Hwang, JY., Doig, J. et al. Highly selective dispersion of single-walled carbon nanotubes using aromatic polymers. Nature Nanotech 2, 640–646 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2007.290

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