Suppression of Blinking and Enhanced Exciton Emission from Individual Carbon Nanotubes

Abstract

Blinking and spectral diffusion are hallmarks of nanoscale light emitters and a challenge for creating stable fluorescent biomarkers or efficient nonclassical light sources. Here, we demonstrate suppression of blinking and spectral diffusion of individual single-wall carbon nanotubes by manipulation of their dielectric environment, resulting in 5-fold enhanced light emission. In addition, it was found that the characteristic slopes of the blinking power laws are largely independent of the dielectric environment in the limit of a large number of switching events. In contrast, the on/off ratio determined from statistical occurrence analysis is found to be improved by 3 orders of magnitude toward the on state, making the on/off ratio an important measure for charge transfer from/into the local dielectric environment of a quantum emitter. Furthermore, our approach is compatible with integration into cavities, in contrast to previous demonstrations of spectral diffusion suppression achieved in free-standing single-wall carbon nanotubes. This opens up possibilities to couple the exciton emission of nonblinking carbon nanotubes to cavity modes to further benefit by the Purcell effect and to enhance the light extraction efficiency, in order to ultimately demonstrate efficient photonic devices.

Role of residual polymer on chemical vapor grown graphene by Raman spectroscopy

“…The fact that doping value maintains in the presence/absence of PMMA indicates that the contact between protruding SiO 2 features and graphene is main contributor to doping and PMMA has negligible effect. Similar trend has been observed in single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) [42][43][44]: while SWNT on quartz substrate does not have or weak photoluminescence (PL) [43,45], SWNT embedded in PMMA [44] or on sapphire [45] displays strong PL. This is attributed to significant doping effect of SiO 2 compared to neural PMMA or basic sapphire.…”

Strong reduction of exciton-phonon coupling in single-wall carbon nanotubes of high crystalline quality: Insight into broadening mechanisms and exciton localization

“…By performing a statistical study on more than 40 SWNTs, we find a FWHM distribution centered around 500 µeV with values as low as 250 µeV (resolution limited). We stress that, despite the lack of control of the microscopic dielectric environment in our sample, the observed FWHM distribution is cen- presented in the literature [20,29,30], or comparable to the values reported in studies focusing on the control of the environment-induced dephasing (air-bridging or polymer wrapped SWNTs) [25,31]. As a reference for CVD-grown SWNTs, we compare typical spectra of L-SWNTs with those of similarly processed CoMoCat SWNTs.…”

“…. ) and extrinsic (residual doping [23], interfacial inhomogeneities [24], fluctuating environment [9,25],. .…”

Photoinduced Band Gap Shift and Deep Levels in Luminescent Carbon Nanotubes

“…7 Capping layers were found to reduce blinking on surface nanotubes, presumably because they act as diffusion barriers. 8 Very recently, while this paper was under review, it was reported that elevated laser powers increase stepwise blinking frequency in micelle-encapsulated nanotubes. 9 Also very recently, relatively long (several micrometers) micelle-encapsulated nanotubes in solution have been imaged in photoluminescence while being chemically attacked to induce blinking.…”