Sorting of CVD-grown single-walled carbon nanotubes by means of gel column chromatography

Abstract

We report the use of scalable gel column chromatography to sort single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) from different production schemes according to their electronic properties. We show that this method, originally developed for HiPCO® tubes, can equally well be applied to the sorting of commercially available SWCNTs produced by CVD. We use UV–Vis spectroscopy for the quantitative characterization of the samples. It allows a fast determination of the mSWCNT and scSWCNT contents in a sample with only few preliminary information. For further prove, we assembled field-effect transistors (FETs) from enriched semiconducting suspensions by dielectrophoresis. The measurement of the I–V curves approves that FETs with reasonable electrical performance can be assembled in a single preparation step. Schematic viewgraph of the sorting procedure using sephacryl gel.