Separation of left- and right-handed semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotube enantiomers using achiral amino acid surfactant

Abstract

Synthesized single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are racemic mixtures of various (n, m) species with different electronic types, which greatly impeded their practical applications and fundamental research. In this paper, achiral amino acid surfactant sodium N-cocoyl sarcosinate (N-CS) not only displayed selectivity toward s-SWNTs but also could further separate the sorted s-SWNTs by the chirality indices (n, m) and left- and right-handedness with the aid of density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGU). The specific molecular structure of N-CS offered the possibility of recognizing the left- and right-handedness of SWNTs. The enantiomer separation mechanism was illustrated by Molecular dynamics simulations.

Graphical Abstract

Achiral amino-acid surfactant N-CS was used to separate SWNTs by chiral indices and left- and right-handedness with the aid of density gradient ultracentrifugation

Keywords:

• Chirality and enantiomer separation
• amide acid surfactant
• density gradient ultracentrifugation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Project of Shandong Province (Major Scientific and Technological Innovation Project) under Grant [2022CXGC020706] and Shandong Jiaotong University under Grant [BS201902003].