A new technique for sorting carbon nanotubes

12 July 2008

The present method of fabricating carbon nanotube produces a mixture of semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes and therefore it is of no use for certain applications such as solar cells, fast switching transistors etc. Although single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi wall carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) have been used for a number of applications including some key areas such as energy, medical, health, manufacturing etc., however for above mentioned applications we need to separate out the semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes.

Researchers at Samsung Advanced Institute of Korea and Stanford University, US have designed a technique through which semiconducting nanotubes can be separated from metallic nanotubes. Actually semiconducting nanotubes are required for transistor applications, however for solar cell applications scientists needs pure metallic carbon nanotube.

Researchers added nanotube solution to a spinning wafer and used different chemical groups for attracting different types of carbon nanotubes. Researchers used amine group for attracting semiconducting nanotubes and phenyl group for attracting metallic nanotubes.

Research on other groups is also in progress for sorting out different types of nanotubes. The team has already prepared a transistor with the semiconducting nanotube as purified by above chemical technique. Researchers believe that the technique will address the major challenge and we can see many more applications based on these purified carbon nanotubes.

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