The 4th Carbon Nanotube Workshop at NIST: Measurement and Control of Chirality

The 4th NIST workshop on single wall carbon nanotubes will be held September 23rd and 24th 2010 at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD. In the AML Room C103-106. It will feature in-depth presentations and discussion of recent breakthroughs in the control and measurement of single-wall carbon nanotube chirality, along with the resulting advances in chirality resolved measurements and applications.

A portion of the workshop will be devoted to analyzing the results of an inter-laboratory study on various chirality measurement methods, 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 measurements, and disseminate 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.