Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2016)
    Nanomaterials Tuesday Sessions
       Session NM-TuE

Invited Paper NM-TuE1
Surface and Screening Effects on Optical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes

Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 5:40 pm, Room Hau

Session: Nanofabrication and Nanodevices II
Presenter: Yuichiro Kato, RIKEN, Japan
Correspondent: Click to Email

Screening is limited in single-walled carbon nanotubes because of their one-dimensional nature, and the strong Coulomb interactions result in optical spectra dominated by excitons with binding energies lager than half an eV. Also because of the limited screening, a charged carrier can be bound to an exciton to form a trion that is stable at room temperature. Adsorption and desorption of molecules on the surface of nanotubes can readily modulate such interactions.

Here we discuss experiments aimed at highlighting the behaviors of excitons and trions in individual suspended carbon nanotubes. Simultaneous photoluminescence and photoconductivity spectroscopy show evidences for spontaneous dissociation of excitons [1], despite the expectation that free carrier generation from such a tightly-bound state would be difficult. As the field is increased, we observe an emergence of new absorption peaks in the excitation spectra, which can be explained by electrical activation of dark excited states [2]. Although trion formation has been thought to be difficult in suspended nanotubes due to low exciton-carrier scattering rates, we have succeeded in identifying trion emission under an application of gate voltages [3]. More recently, we have observed optical bistability of exciton emission, which is attributed to resonance shifts caused by molecular adsorption and desorption.

Work supported by KAKENHI, The Canon Foundation, The Asahi Glass Foundation, and the Photon Frontier Network Program of MEXT, Japan.

[1] Y. Kumamoto, M. Yoshida, A. Ishii, A. Yokoyama, T. Shimada, Y. K. Kato, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 117401 (2014).

[2] T. Uda, M. Yoshida, A. Ishii, Y. K. Kato, Nano Lett. 16, 2278 (2016).

[3] M. Yoshida, A. Popert, Y. K. Kato, Phys. Rev. B 93, 041402(R) (2016).