Surfactants are needed to create stable suspensions of carbon nanotubes.
Increasingly, these surfactants are given additional functionalities,
resulting in bigger and more complex molecules with several subunits. We
investigate the effect of assembly of these subunits for a class of perylene-
based functional surfactants. The subunits that all surfactants are based on
are a perylene core, hydrophilic polyglycerol dendrons, and alkyl chains of
different orientations and lengths. The assembly of these subunits affects
both the molecules' performance as a surfactant and the efficiency of the
energy-transfer complexes formed by the nanotube and surfactant through a π–π
stacking mechanism. This results in a best practice guide for designing
functional surfactants with π–π stacking cores, and affords more general
insights that are applicable to non π–π stacking systems as well
