Grafting of porphyrin oligomers on single-walled carbon nanotubes by Hay coupling

Abstract

The fabrication of nanotube-based functional materials is still limited by the difficulty in incorporating highly engineered molecules onto the nanotube surface. To overcome this difficulty, the development of procedures involving two subsequent reaction steps on the nanotubes appeared particularly promising. It was previously demonstrated that “click chemistry” (CuAAC) permits efficiently functionalising nanotubes with a wide variety of materials (from inorganic to biological). In this work, we present an original strategy based on Hay coupling (i.e. the oxidative coupling between triple bonds) to fabricate nanotube–porphyrin conjugates. Porphyrins containing ethynyl functional groups were attached on single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) bearing phenylacetylene groups and the resulting materials were fully characterised.