Nanocarbons including fullerene, carbon nanotube and graphene, known as new carbon allotropes, have the potential to be epoch-making functional materials. Especially, a carbon nanotube, which was discovered by Dr. S. Iijima in 1991, has won the representative position of nanotechnology because of its many attractive physical properties. Since the discovery, 20 years have almost passed. Although carbon nanotube can be applied to a wide variety of products involved in mechanics, electronics, photonics, energy science, biomedical science and so on, it has born less fruit in the practical applications than previously expected, so far. One of the reasons is the difficulty to grow homogeneous nanotubes, especially single-chirality nanotubes. On the other hand, the remarkable progress has been made in separation techniques of single-chirality nanotubes in recent years. The separation techniques would give us the key to solve the problems in its practical applications. In this paper, the brief overview of carbon nanotube basics and hopeful candidates of its applications will be discussed, referring to the other nanocarbons. Then, density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGU) method will be introduced, as one of successful separation techniques, showing our recent results to fabricate carbon nanotube field effect transistors by means of dielectrophoresis with DGU extract solution.
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