Ever since their discovery, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been touted as a material of the future and a lengthy list of possible applications are often cited in the literature.  However, the realization of these applications have so far been hindered by exactly the property which made CNTs so attractive in the first place, namely their varying optical and electronic properties.  In order to become a true advanced material of the future it is necessary to develop techniques to prepare CNTs with defined length, wall number, diameter, electronic and optical property on the large scale.  Furthermore, in addition to simply having large quantities, it is important that strategies for their incorporation into large-area devices are developed.

In our work we address these issues with the use of aqueous gel based sorting techniques to routinely prepare milligram quantities of metallic and semiconducting, single chirality and even double walled carbon nanotubes with defined outer-wall electronic type.  This ‘toolbox’ of available CNTs is then used for the realization of CNT based devices with applications to energy.  For example CNT:Fullerene solar cells, CNT:Si solar cells and CNT based light sensitive elements.  In addition to being of fundamental scientific interest these applications also provide us the opportunity to address the challenges of controlling this 1 D nanomaterial on the macro-scale.  To this end we prepare inks from sorted CNT material and look at strategies to align them in thin films over large areas. 

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