Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes as a Molecular Heater for Thermoresponsive Polymer Gel Composite

The structural stiffness, effective optical absorption ranging from UV to IR region and efficient photothermal conversion of the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are attractive feature as a molecular heater, which can be useful for therapy, actuator and so on. Dai et al. reported that the near-IR (NIR) irradiation to a living HeLa cell after uptaking a CNTs/DNA composite caused death of the cells (Kam, et al., 2005) due to the intense local heating triggered by the NIR irradiation. We have described that pulsed-NIR irradiation of CNTs wrapped by an anthracenependanted polymer allowed the dissociation of the polymer from the CNTs surface followed by aggregation of the CNTs, in which the CNTs act as a “molecular heater” that triggers removal of the polymer from the SWNT surface.(Narimatsu, et al., 2006) On the other hand, thermoresponsive polymer gels, which show phase transitions, are of interests in wide areas of science and technology from the aspects of both fundamental (experimental and theory) and applications (Bohidar, et al., 2003). Poly(Nisopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) (Hirotsu, et al., 1987; Schild, 1992) and its derivatives are well-known thermoresponsive materials, which show a phase transition triggered by external stimuli such as the solvent composition, (Katayama, et al., 1984) pH, (Tanaka, et al., 1980) ionic strength, (Tanaka, et al., 1980) electric field (Tanaka, et al., 1982) and light. (Ishikawa, et al., 1993; Juodkazis, et al., 2000; Mamada, et al., 1990; Nayak & Lyon, 2004; Suzuki & Tanaka, 1990) Among the various light sources, NIR laser light is a fascinating stimulus especially from a biomedical point of view, because biomedical tissues have a slight absorption in the NIR region, (Weissleder, 2001) which enable remote stimulation of the NIR absorbent in the body from the outside. The combination of CNTs with PNIPAM would expect to trigger the phase transition of PNIPAM with NIR irradiation through photothermal conversion of CNTs. In this article, we propose the utilization of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as a photon antenna that serves as an effective “molecular heater” around the NIR region.

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