Strategic Immobilization of Molecular Catalysts onto Carbon Nanotubes via Noncovalent Interaction for Catalytic Organic Transformations

Since their discovery, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) continue to attract growing interest from scientists in a wide range of fields, likely due to their fascinating nanoarchitecture as well as their electronic and physical properties. From the viewpoint of synthetic chemistry, the chemical and physical stability, high surface area, and π-stacking nature of CNTs are attractive features for their application as solid supports for molecular catalysts. The chemical functionalization of CNTs has been explored for various applications, including covalent and noncovalent grafting of molecular catalysts. Although noncovalent grafting provides less stable immobilized catalysts compared with covalently grafted hybrid molecular catalysts and CNTs, the preparation protocol is expeditious and repetitive use of the catalysts is well demonstrated, confirming their potential broad utility in synthetic organic chemistry.