Morphology determination of luminescent carbon nanotubes by analytical super-resolution microscopy approaches

The ability to determine the precise structure of nano-objects is essential for a multitude of applications. This is particularly true of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), which are produced as heterogeneous samples. Current techniques used for their characterization require sophisticated instrumentation, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), or a compromise on accuracy. In this paper, we propose to use super-resolution microscopy (SRM) to accurately determine the morphology (orientation, length and shape) of individual luminescent SWCNTs. We generate super-resolved images using three recently published SRM analytical software packages (DPR, eSRRF and MSSR) and metrologically compare their performance to determine the morphological properties of SWCNTs. For this, ground-truth information on nanotube morphologies were obtained using polarization measurements and AFM to directly correlate the results from SRM at the single particle level. We show a more than 4-fold improvement in resolution over standard photoluminescence imaging, revealing hidden morphologies as efficiently as AFM. We finally demonstrate that DPR, and eventually eSRRF can effectively assess SWCNT length distribution in a much faster and more accessible way than AFM. We believe that this approach can be generalized to other types of luminescent nanostructures and thus become a new standard for rapid and accurate characterization of samples.