Polymer Library Comprising Fluorene and Carbazole Homo- and Copolymers for Selective Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Extraction

Abstract

To date, (n, m) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) cannot be selectively synthesized. Therefore, postprocessing of SWNTs including solubilization and sorting is necessary for further applications. Toward this goal, we have synthesized a polymer library consisting of fluorene- and carbazole-based homo- and copolymers. Variations of the connection of these aromatics together with the incorporation of further conjugated monomers give access to a broad diversity of polymers. Their ability to selectively wrap specific (n, m) species is investigated toward HiPco SWNTs raw material which contains more than 40 (n, m) species. Absorption and fluorescence spectroscopies were used to analyze SWNTs/polymer suspensions. These results provide evidence for selective SWNTs/polymer interactions and allow a more detailed assessment of polymer structure–property relationships, thus paving the way toward custom synthesis of polymers for single (n, m) SWNTs extraction.