Semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) make them promising for biological and nanoelectronics applications. This talk will cover our research on sorting SWNTs by type and chirality motivated by these aspects. SWNTs are novel fluorescence imaging probes in the second near-infrared (NIR-II, 1.0-1.4 mm) window. Thus far, SWNTs used for biological applications have been a complex mixture of metallic and semiconducting species with random chiralities, preventing simultaneous resonant excitation of all semiconducting nanotubes and emission at a single well-defined wavelength. We developed a simple gel filtration method to enrich semiconducting (12, 1) and (11, 3) SWNTs with identical resonance absorption at ~800 nm and proximal emissions at ~ 1200 nm. The chirality sorted SWNTs showed ~ 5-fold higher photoluminescence intensity than unsorted SWNTs on a per-mass basis. Real-time in vivo video imaging of whole mouse body and tumor vessels was achieved using much lower injected dose of SWNTs than previous heterogeneous mixture, demonstrating resonantly-excited and chirality-specific SWNTs for biological imaging.In terms of electronics applications, enrichment of semiconducting SWNTs with an average diameter of ~1.4 nm at a purity of ~ 97% was achieved by gel filtration chromatography. Depletion attraction forces between nanotubes were exploited to assemble large numbers of semiconducting SWNTs into raft-like arrays on SiO2/Si substrates. Characterization by microscopy and spectroscopy revealed a high degree of alignment and an unprecedented packing density of >100 tubes/�m in these rafts. Field-effect transistors (FETs) made from these rafts exhibited high performance, with short channel devices showing current density of ~ 87 �A/�m and a total current of 25 �A/device at on/off ratios > 400. The high purity of semiconducting tubes, relatively large diameter, dense packing, and good alignment in these rafts make them promising for integration into high performance nanoelectronic devices.

Chemical sorting, functionalization, and assembly of carbon nanotube for biological and nanoelectronics applications

245th National Meeting (2013)

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