Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.139, No.45, 16068-16071, 2017
Determination of Enantiomeric Purity of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes Using Flavin Mononucleotide
Although enantiomeric separation of single wall carbon nanotubes is possible, their enantiomeric purity (EP) remains an issue due to a lack of effective evaluation methods. In this work, we report the EP of (6,5) carbon nanotube enantiomers using flavin mono nucleotide (FMN) as an enantiomer-sensitive dispersant. The enantiomers (6,5) and (11,-5) were separated by a gel column chromatography method and dispersed in a FMN aqueous solution. In these solutions, (6,5) and (11,-5) showed E-11 optical transitions at different wavelengths due to handedness-dependent interactions with the FMN molecule, which enabled us to estimate each concentration, namely, the ER We prepared six intermediate-purity enantiomer samples by mixing the (6,5) and (11,-5) enantiomers and measured their circular dichroism (CD) spectra. The CD signal was confirmed to change linearly with the EP. Using this relationship, we can estimate the EP of any mixture of (6,5) and (11,-5) from its CD intensity.