(648e) Addressing HiPco Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Bundles with Optically Patterned Virtual-Electrodes

Solution phase processing of carbon nanotube materials requires massive parallelism for high throughput unit operations combined with specificity aimed at discriminating between semiconducting and metallic fractions commonly found after nanotube synthesis. As shown recently with nanowires and multiwalled carbon nanotubes [1, 2], optoelectronic tweezers (OET) offer a unique combination of real-time, massively-parallel manipulation of nanostructures with the ability to distinguish particles based on their dielectric constant and conductivity alone. In this work we present the ability of OET to trap and translate bundles of HiPco single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). Fluorescent labeling enables visualization of SWCNT solution-phase dynamics in conjunction with time-correlated single-photon counting and video microscopy. High-speed digital thermography as well as anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy are used to characterize potential heating profiles of SWCNT ensembles trapped within discrete OET virtual-electrodes. Future work will focus on extending OET to semiconducting and metallic SWCNTs materials enriched with density-gradient ultracentrifugation.

[1] Jamshidi, A.*; Pauzauskie, P.J.*; et al., Nature Photonics (2008)

[2] Pauzauskie, P.J.*; Jamshidi, A.*; et al., Applied Physics Letters, in press (2009)

* - equal contribution