Synchronous Sorting and Functionalization of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Using Organic Derivatives of Hydrazine

Abstract

The purification and sorting of complex mixtures of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is essential to facilitate their implementation. Conjugated polymer extraction (CPE) can be used to achieve this goal. However, the obtained purified SWCNTs are often very diluted, hindering their use. Furthermore, the SWCNTs prepared this way often exhibit unsatisfactory photoluminescence quantum yields (PLQYs). In this study, how both of these problems can be solved by the application of a newly designed platform is shown for differentiation/covalent modification of SWCNTs. The addition of organic phenylhydrazine derivatives is found to greatly increase the yield of SWCNT separation. Concomitantly, such a range of chemical compounds also revealed great utility for the introduction of luminescent defects into SWCNTs to enhance PLQYs. The density of defects can be tailored by various parameters, while the duration of the process is dramatically shorter (tens of seconds to minutes) than that of the well-known methods (several hours to days). Notably, the described SWCNT functionalization framework modifies SWCNTs very effectively both in organic solvents and water (at a reactant concentration of ≈ 100 ng mL⁻¹). The straightforward nature of the reported approach and its high versatility open the way toward a broad spectrum of long-awaited applications of monochiral SWCNTs.