British team devises method for separating carbon nanotubes cheaply

When single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are made, they come out in both metallic and semiconducting material form. Unfortunately, different applications require one or the other of these materials, but not both, which means they need to be separated. Even more unfortunately, efforts to do so have proven to be very expensive. Now, though, due to the efforts of a British team of physicists, as they describe in their paper in ACS Nano, a new method has been devised that allows SWCNTs to be separated cheaply enough to allow for bulk manufacturing.