tion between PANI and MWNTs and the nature of chain growth have been investigated and explained according to the results of FT-IR analysis. The improvement of thermal stability and crystallinity of the nanocomposites have been evaluated by using TGA and XRD. The mechanism of charge transport in these composites has also been studied by measuring the DC conductivity of all samples and examining the temperature–conductivity relations. MWNT alignment should be possible with other nanometer-sized building composites films, offering a general route for controlled assembly of organized nanomaterials and devices.

Covalent

The real-time vibrational spectroscopy was utilized to obtain both electronic and vibrational dynamics in a conjugated polymer under the same excitation and probing condition by using the same sample and observing at the same time. Most of the conjugated polymers are in an amorphous phase, in which there is a relatively broad distribution of chain length, conjugation length, and degree of interaction strength between neighboring chains. Because of the varieties, a simultaneous measurement of electronic and vibrational dynamics in a broad spectral range is considered to be most powerful to study such systems as conjugated polymers. In the present paper, we performed this type of experiment of the simultaneous probing of electronic and vibrational relaxations at 128 wavelengths. The sample studied here is an amino-moiety-containing conjugated polymer, poly3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl-p-dimethylaminobenzylidenequinoidmethene
PHTDMABQ, whose monomer is a derivative of a thiophene oligomer. The light source is a few-cycle pulse laser with an ultimate time resolution of 0.2 fs in the visible and near IR ranges. The data containing both electronic relaxation and vibrational dynamics were analyzed to obtain a more reliable relaxation mechanism of the excitations than a combination of individual studies of electronic and vibrational relaxations. By utilizing the ultrafast pumpprobe spectroscopic system, we could identify the exciton state with a
-electron delocalized in benzilidene ring. In the polymer PHTDMABQ, the geometrical relaxation from the free exciton to the exciton polaron takes place in 60–100 fs. This time is close to that observed in several polydiacetylenes previously reported. The C-C single bond stretching frequencies of the free exciton and exciton polaron are about 1300 and 1350 cm−1. The coherent molecular vibration after the geometrical relaxation is considered to be a kind of reaction induced coherence. This coherent vibration decays with the time constant of about 450 fs.

Purification of high-quality few-walled carbon nanotubes (fWNTs) was developed by slow but selective oxidation in hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) at room temperature. The purity, nanotubes’ structure, and thermal stability of purified fWNTs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Raman spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), respectively. The results showed that fWNTs could be selectively purified by prolonging the stirring time in 30 wt % H2O2 solution. Highly purified fWNTs were obtained,having a high G/D ratio in Raman spectra and good thermal stability indicating the good quality of the purified fWNTs. The approach provides a simple low cost method for purification that also has higher nanotube yield than other purification methods.

A chitosan (CS)-grafted multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) composite (CS-MWCNT) was prepared via covalently grafting a biocompatible polymer CS onto the surfaces of MWCNT and was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV–vis), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The interaction between MWCNT and CS was investigated and explained according to the FTIR and UV–vis results. More evidence for the presence of the CS-MWCNT was confirmed by TEM images. In the TEM images, a core-shell structure with nanotubes in the center and a CS layer lying around them was observed. The electrochemical properties of the CS-MWCNT were characterized by an electrodeposition method that involves depositing it on a Au electrode. The porous microstructure of the CS-MWCNT modified electrode was observed by scanning electron microscopy. The excellent electrocatalytic ability of the CS-MWCNT modified electrode towards hydrogen peroxide is applicable to the development of oxidase-based amperometric biosensors.