Interactions and Chemical Transformations of Coronene Inside and Outside Carbon Nanotubes |
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Authors: | Bea Botka Melinda E. Füstös Hajnalka M. Tóháti Katalin Németh Gyöngyi Klupp Zsolt Szekrényes Dorina Kocsis Margita Utczás Edit Székely Tamás Váczi György Tarczay Rudi Hackl Thomas W. Chamberlain Andrei N. Khlobystov Katalin Kamarás |
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Affiliation: | 1. Walther‐Meissner‐Institute, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, , 85748 Garching, Germany;2. Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Babes?‐Bolyai University, , 400084 Cluj‐Napoca, Romania;3. Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, , P.O.Box 49, 1525 Budapest, Hungary;4. Department of Chemical and Environmental Process Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, , 1111 Budapest, Hungary;5. Department of Mineralogy, E?tv?s Loránd University, , 1117 Budapest, Hungary;6. Laboratory of Molecular Spectroscopy, Institute of Chemistry, E?tv?s Loránd University, , 1518 Budapest, Hungary;7. School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham, , Nottingham, NG7 2RD UK |
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Abstract: | By exposing flat and curved carbon surfaces to coronene, a variety of van der Waals hybrid heterostructures are 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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Keywords: | coronene graphene nanoribbons carbon nanotubes encapsulation |
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