Selective dispersion of single-walled carbon nanotubesvia easily accessible conjugated click polymers

Abstract

To date synthetic methods to selectively produce specific (n, m) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are not available. Therefore, post-processing of SWCNTs including solubilization and sorting by metallicity, length, diameter, chirality or (n, m) is necessary for further applications. To reach the goal of sorting SWCNTs, we have synthesized various conjugated polymers consisting of alternating 9,9-dialkyl fluorene and 1,2,3-triazole units via copper catalyzed alkyne–azide conjugation chemistry. Their ability to selectively wrap specific (n, m) SWCNTs is investigated towards HiPco SWCNT raw materials which contain more than 40 (n, m) species and are found to be comparable to fluorene based triazole free polymers, which are typically prepared via Suzuki-type polymerization. However, the herein reported triazole-linked click polymers are significantly simpler to prepare than their Suzuki-analogs. Fluorescence and UV/Vis NIR spectroscopy were employed to analyze the SWCNTs–polymer suspensions and demonstrate their selectivity for dispersing SWCNTs.