Large-scale single-chirality separation of single-wall nanotubes by simple gel chromatography

By Huaping Liu, D. Nishide, Takeshi Tanaka, H. Kataura. Nature Communications, 2011

842 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Monostructured single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are important in both scientific research and electronic and biomedical applications; however, the bulk separation of SWCNTs into populations of single-chirality nanotubes remains challenging. Here we report a simple and effective method for the large-scale chirality separation of SWCNTs using a single-surfactant multicolumn gel chromatography method utilizing one surfactant and a series of vertically connected gel columns. This method is based on the structure-dependent interaction strength of SWCNTs with an allyl dextran-based gel. Overloading an SWCNT dispersion on the top column results in the adsorption sites of the column becoming fully occupied by the nanotubes that exhibit the strongest interaction with the gel. The unbound nanotubes flow through to the next column, and the nanotubes with the second strongest interaction with the gel are adsorbed in this stage. In this manner, 13 different (n, m) species were separated. Metallic SWCNTs were finally collected as unbound nanotubes because they exhibited the lowest interaction with the gel.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c5de5f81e16cee851ce65fd54c09905647e628d

How researchers see this paper

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. Zhiyong Zhang
2. Lianmao Peng
3. Shinji Yamashita
4. C. Backes

In Materials Chemistry

1. Lin F. Yang
2. Zhiyong Zhang
3. Lianmao Peng
4. Yan Li
5. Shinji Yamashita
6. C. Backes

Citations in the corpus

• Efficient photovoltage multiplication in carbon nanotubes (2011, background): “High-purity (99p) semiconducting CNTs have now been obtaine”
• Large scale, selective dispersion of long single-walled carbon nanotubes with high photoluminescence quantum yield by shear force mixing (2016, background): “various sorting techniques, such as gel chromatography [8], density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGU) [9], and aqueous two-phase separation [10], selectively wrapping SWCNTs with conjugated polymers leads to very pure semiconducting and even monochiral dispersions with comparatively low effort.”
• A Tutorial on Nonlinear Photonic Applications of Carbon Nanotube and Graphene (2012, background): “Recently, single-chirality separation from mixed samples is becoming possible [37].”