Gili Bisker

Zuckerman Faculty Scholar Gili Bisker, Head of the Marian Gertner Institute for Medical Nanosystems at Tel Aviv University’s Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, published Post-functionalization modification as a modular strategy for size-selective fluorescence response of single-walled carbon nanotubes to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in Materials Horizons. Her study presents a method that selectively alters the surface of polymer-encapsulated single-walled carbon nanotubes to make them fluorescently responsive to different sizes of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, broadening their use in chemical detection and nanotechnology applications without compromising chirality or requiring new materials.

Abstract: 
Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with tailored functionalization serve as optically responsive nanoparticles, but when encapsulated by chirality-selective polymers, they often remain inert to analytes. To expand their utility, we developed a post-functionalization modification strategy introducing oxygen defects into chirality-pure (and  SWCNTs suspended by PFO-BPy6,6′ and PFO-FH, respectively… These findings demonstrate that PFM enables controllable surface coverage and size-selective PAH interactions, broadening SWCNTs utility as optical nanoprobes.