The 4th Carbon Nanotube Workshop at NIST

The 4th Carbon Nanotube Workshop at NIST was held on September 23rd and 24th 2010. It featured in depth presentations and discussions of recent breakthroughs in the control and measurement of single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) chirality, along with the resulting advances in chirality resolved measurements and applications.

A summary of the workshop is posted here.

A portion of the workshop was devoted to analysis of the results of an inter-laboratory study on the measurement of chirality distribution within a nanotube population. This study was conducted under the auspices of the Versailles Project on Advanced Measurements and Standards (VAMAS).

The measurement of carbon nanotube chirality and the use of these measurements to separate the various mixtures will be critical to future applications. The goal of this workshop is to move forward as a community in chirality measurement and to identify and resolve outstanding problems in order to advance applications and to enable well-controlled environmental, health, and safety (EHS) assessments. We will capture the state of the current technology in chirality distribution measurments, and disseinate this summary to the nanotube community.

The VAMAS Round Robin is the first test of consensus on measurement methods for chirality distribution and we will discuss the early results. The goal of this round robin is to provide a basis for comparison between different measurement methodologies, measurement types and laboratories of the chirality specification for a given sample. This will enable development of techniques for absolute determination of the SWCNT chiral vector distribution in a dispersed population. The sample for this project is the Long fraction of a NIST reference material (RM) for length separated single-wall carbon nanotubes in aqueous dispersion. Pictures below show the full set of RM 8281, and the absorbance spectrum of the Long fraction.

The agenda is posted here.

Nanotube Metrology
Previous Nanotube Workshops at NIST

• Mark Hersam, Northwestern University
• Jeffrey Blackburn, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Stephen Doorn, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Hongjie Dai, Stanford University
• Hua Jiang, Aalto University
• Ado Jorio, Universadade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Shawn Chen, National Institute of Health
• Hiromichi Kataura, AIST Japan
• Michael Arnorld, University of Wisconsin
• R. Bruce Weisman, Rice University
• Debdulal Roy, National Physical Lab., UK
• Xiamin (Helen) Tu, NIST
• Jeffrey A. Fagan, NIST
• Sivaram Arepalli, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
• Nathan Yoder, Nanointegris Corp.
• Erlon Ferreira, INMETRO, Brazil
• R. Mohan Sankaran, Case Western Reserve University