title: Chiral selectivity in the charge-transfer bleaching of single-walled carbon-nanotube spectra.
abstract: Chiral selective reactivity and redox chemistry of carbon nanotubes are two emerging fields of nanoscience. These areas hold strong promise for producing methods for isolating nanotubes into pure samples of a single electronic type, and for reversible doping of nanotubes for electronics applications. Here, we study the selective reactivity of single-walled carbon nanotubes with organic acceptor molecules. We observe spectral bleaching of the nanotube electronic transitions consistent with an electron-transfer reaction occurring from the nanotubes to the organic acceptors. The reaction kinetics are found to have a strong chiral dependence, with rates being slowest for large-bandgap species and increasing for smaller-bandgap nanotubes. The chiral-dependent kinetics can be tuned to effectively freeze the reacted spectra at a fixed chiral distribution. Such tunable redox chemistry may be important for future applications in reversible non-covalent modification of nanotube electronic properties and in chiral selective separations.
authors.affiliation: Chemistry Division, C-ACS, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: O' Connell
authors.forename: Ezra E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Eibergen
authors.forename: Stephen K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Doorn