A single liquid chromatography procedure to concentrate, separate and collect size-selected polyynes produced by pulsed laser ablation in water

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel RP-HPLC method to efficiently concentrate, separate, and collect size-selected polyynes produced by pulsed laser ablation in water, enhancing their characterization and potential applications.

Contribution

The authors developed a single RP-HPLC procedure for size-selective collection of polyynes directly from aqueous solutions, improving yield and simplifying the process.

Findings

Optimized laser ablation parameters increased polyynes yield.

The RP-HPLC method enabled direct injection and separation of aqueous samples.

Size-selected polyynes were successfully characterized for functional material applications.

Abstract

Polyynes are linear carbon chains characterized by alternated single and triple bonds and terminated by hydrogen or other terminal substituents. They can be synthesized by pulsed laser ablation in liquid (PLAL) as a scalable, cost-effective, and fast physical technique. Water can be employed as a solvent for PLAL to avoid toxicity problems and to reduce costs compared to organic solvents. However, in this case, the production yield of polyynes reached is extremely low and prevents further characterization and implementation in new functional materials. In this work, we synthesized polyynes by pulsed laser ablation in water and we optimized the process parameters to improve the yield of polyynes by PLAL. Then, we developed a procedure entirely based on reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) which effectively enables the concentration, separation and collection of polyynes according to their length. Since the polyynes sample is an aqueous solution, we could inject it directly into the RP-HPLC column without the dilution step required in the case of a sample in an organic solvent. Thanks to our single RP-HPLC procedure, it is possible to highly increase the concentration and separately characterize different size-selected polyynes for further use in functional materials.