Determination of the metallic/semiconducting ratio in bulk single-wall carbon nanotube samples by cobalt porphyrin probe electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy.

A simple and quantitative, self-calibrating spectroscopic technique for the determination of the ratio of metallic to semiconducting single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in a bulk sample is presented. The technique is based on the measurement of the electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrum of the SWCNT sample to which cobalt(II)octaethylporphyrin (CoOEP) probe molecules have been added. This yields signals from both CoOEP molecules on metallic and on semiconducting tubes, which are easily distinguished and accurately characterized in this work. By applying this technique to a variety of SWCNT samples produced by different synthesis methods, it is shown that these signals for metallic and semiconducting tubes are independent of other factors such as tube length, defect density, and diameter, allowing the intensities of both signals for arbitrary samples to be retrieved by a straightforward least-squares regression. The technique is self-calibrating in that the EPR intensity can be directly related to the number of spins (number of CoOEP probe molecules), and as the adsorption of the CoOEP molecules is itself found to be unbiased toward metallic or semiconducting tubes, the measured intensities can be directly related to the mass percentage of metallic and semiconducting tubes in the bulk SWCNT sample. With the use of this method it was found that for some samples the metallic/semiconducting ratios strongly differed from the usual 1:2 ratio.