Arylazide-based, photochemical functionalization of carbon nanotubes

Abstract

Since carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were discovered, there were explosive increases of interest on nanotechnology. CNTs were revealed as having some interesting characteristics like mechanical strength stronger than steel, flexibility, thermal and electronic conductivity. With these amazing features, CNTs were expected to be a new material for next generation devices. Unfortunately, CNTs have some critical problems like purification, handling, mass production, separation of CNTs having different electrical property. Numerous researches were surveyed to overcome these problems, and many of them were successful. Within the researches, chemical modification of CNTs was the most fascinating field. Chemically inert CNTs were able to be functionalized with various ways, and the modified CNTs had a chance to have some interesting characteristics. Moreover, integration of CNTs with other molecules like protein, DNA, and polymer were feasible via chemical modification. We developed a new method for functionalizing sidewalls of carbon nanotubes, where arylazide-based photochemistry was utilized. With the photoreaction of the arylazide moiety, various functionalilities could easily be introduced. In this experiment, we used a biotin-containing arylazide molecule, and the patterns of CNTs were generated by biotin-streptavidin interactions. The reaction is determined by XPS and IR, and the patterns of CNTs were visualized by fluorescence microscopy, and a thin layer of the patterned CNTs was observed in the SEM images.