Surface mounted porphyrin-nanotube arrays: Towards energy-harvesting surfaces

Abstract

Abstract-A supramolecular complex was formed between ruthenium porphyrins and pyridyl-functionalised carbon nanotubes, which were in turn covalently attached to a silicon surface. The surface was characterised by LDI-ToF-MS, UV-vis spectrophotometry and steady-state spectrofluorometric methods.

Self-Assembled Materials Incorporating Functional Porphyrins and Carbon Nanoplatforms as Building Blocks for Photovoltaic Energy Applications

“…With these crystals grown from toluene solution, they determined a distance from the centre of the porphyrazine to the centroid of the fullerene of 6.3 Å and they established the existence of van der Waals contact between them. As such there are numerous examples of combinations of porphyrins and fullerenes in the literature, both covalently (D'Souza et al, 2001;Imahori and Fukuzumi, 2004;Cho et al, 2005;Lehtivuori et al, 2006;Schuster et al, 2006;Umeyama and Imahori, 2006;Mathew et al, 2008;Iehl et al, 2011;Charvet et al, 2012;Tolkki et al, 2012) and noncovalently bound (Boyd et al, 1999;Konarev et al, 2002;Hasobe et al, 2005;D'Souza and Ito, 2009;Fathalla et al, 2009;Konarev et al, 2009;Nobukuni et al, 2009;Bhyrappa and Karunanithi, 2010;Hasobe, 2010;Oku et al, 2010;Wessendorf et al, 2010;Iehl et al, 2011;Kahnt et al, 2011;Sprafke et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2011;Konarev et al, 2012).…”

“…The advantage of using nanotubes is that not only is there the potential for several donor molecules per acceptor, but also due to the ballistic movement of electrons through the nanotube, the charge carriers can move through the nanotube from one donor to another almost at the speed of light (Mathew et al, 2008). Much like the noncovalent fullerene composites, supramolecular functionalisation of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) has become a field of growing interest as this does not alter the sp 2 -bonded nanotube walls, thus maintaining the physical properties of the carbon nanotubes (Pascu et al, 2008).…”

Review of Conjugated Porphyrin Systems

“…The mechanism is attributed to the fast transfer of electrons through axial coordination of CNTs and porphyrins. 205…”