Interactions and Chemical Transformations of Coronene Inside and Outside Carbon Nanotubes

Botka, Bea and Füstös, Melinda Emese and Tóháti, Hajnalka M. and Németh, Katalin and Klupp, Gyöngyi and Szekrényes, Zsolt and Kocsis, Dorina and Utczás, Margita and Székely, Edit and Váczi, Tamás and Tarczay, György and Hackl, Rudi and Chamberlain, Thomas W. and Khlobystov, Andrei N. and Kamarás, Katalin (2013) Interactions and Chemical Transformations of Coronene Inside and Outside Carbon Nanotubes. Small, 10 (7). pp. 1369-1378. ISSN 1613-6829

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Abstract

By exposing flat and curved carbon surfaces to coronene, a variety of van der Waals hybrid heterostructures were prepared, including coronene encapsulated in carbon nanotubes, and coronene and dicoronylene adsorbed on nanotubes or graphite via π – π interactions. The structure of the final product is determined by the temperature of the experiment and the curvature of the carbon surface. While at temperatures below and close to the sublimation point of coronene, nanotubes with suitable diameters are filled with single coronene molecules, at higher temperatures additional dimerization and oligomerization of coronene occurs on the surface of carbon nanotubes. The fact that dicoronylene and possible higher oligomers are formed at lower temperatures than expected for vapor-phase polymerization indicates the active role of the carbon surface used primarily as template. Removal of adsorbed species from the nanotube surface is of utmost importance for reliable characterization of encapsulated molecules: it is demonstrated that the green fluorescence attributed previously to encapsulated coronene is instead caused by dicoronylene adsorbed on the surface which can be solubilized and removed using surfactants. After removing most of the adsorbed layer, a combination of Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy was employed to follow the transformation dynamics of coronene molecules inside nanotubes.

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