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

To date, (<i>n</i>, <i>m</i>) 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 (<i>n</i>, <i>m</i>) species is investigated toward HiPco SWNTs raw material which contains more than 40 (<i>n</i>, <i>m</i>) 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 (<i>n</i>, <i>m</i>) SWNTs extraction