No Arabic abstract
Photoluminescence spectroscopy measurements are performed on suspended carbon nanotubes in a field-effect configuration, and the gate voltage dependence of photoluminescence spectra are compared for the pristine and the molecularly adsorbed states of the nanotubes. We quantify the molecular screening effect on the trion binding energies by determining the energy separation between the bright exciton and the trion emission energies for the two states. The voltage dependence shows narrower voltage regions of constant photoluminescence intensity for the adsorbed states, consistent with a reduction in the electronic bandgap due to screening effects. The charge neutrality points are found to shift after molecular adsorption, which suggests changes in the nanotube chemical potential or the contact metal work function.
In cavity quantum electrodynamics, optical emitters that are strongly coupled to cavities give rise to polaritons with characteristics of both the emitters and the cavity excitations. We show that carbon nanotubes can be crystallized into chip-scale, two-dimensionally ordered films and that this new material enables intrinsically ultrastrong emitter-cavity interactions: rather than interacting with external cavities, nanotube excitons couple to the near-infrared plasmon resonances of the nanotubes themselves. Our polycrystalline nanotube films have a hexagonal crystal structure, ~25 nm domains, and a 1.74 nm lattice constant. With this extremely high nanotube density and nearly ideal plasmon-exciton spatial overlap, plasmon-exciton coupling strengths reach 0.5 eV, which is 75% of the bare exciton energy and a near record for room-temperature ultrastrong coupling. Crystallized nanotube films represent a milestone in nanomaterials assembly and provide a compelling foundation for high-ampacity conductors, low-power optical switches, and tunable optical antennas.
We study theoretically the interactions of excitonic states with surface electromagnetic modes of small-diameter (~1 nm) semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes. We show that these interactions can result in strong exciton-surface-plasmon coupling. The exciton absorption lineshapes exhibit the line (Rabi) splitting $~0.1-0.3$ eV as the exciton energy is tuned to the nearest interband surface plasmon resonance of the nanotube. We expect this effect to open a path to new optoelectronic device applications of semiconducting carbon nanotubes.
We propose a framework for inducing strong optomechanical effects in a suspended carbon nanotube based on deformation potential exciton-phonon coupling. The excitons are confined using an inhomogeneous axial electric field which generates optically active quantum dots with a level spacing in the milli-electronvolt range and a characteristic size in the 10-nanometer range. A transverse field induces a tunable parametric coupling between the quantum dot and the flexural modes of the nanotube mediated by electron-phonon interactions. We derive the corresponding excitonic deformation potentials and show that this interaction enables efficient optical ground-state cooling of the fundamental mode and could allow us to realise the strong and ultra-strong coupling regimes of the Jaynes-Cummings and Rabi models.
We report that dark excitons can have a large contribution to the emission intensity in carbon nanotubes due to an efficient exciton conversion from a dark state to a bright state. Time-resolved photoluminescence measurements are used to investigate decay dynamics and diffusion properties of excitons, and we obtain intrinsic lifetimes and diffusion lengths of bright excitons as well as diffusion coefficients for both bright and dark excitons. We find that the dark-to-bright transition rates can be considerably high, and that more than half of the dark excitons can be transformed into the bright excitons. The state transition rates have a large chirality dependence with a family pattern, and the conversion efficiency is found to be significantly enhanced by adsorbed air molecules on the surface of the nanotubes. Our findings show the nontrivial significance of the dark excitons on the emission kinetics in low dimensional materials, and demonstrate the potential for engineering the dark-to-bright conversion process by using surface interactions.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have recently attracted attention as materials for flexible thermoelectric devices. To provide theoretical guideline of how defects influence the thermoelectric performance of CNTs, we theoretically studied the effects of defects (vacancies and Stone-Wales defects) on its thermoelectric properties; thermal conductance, electrical conductance, and Seebeck coefficient. The results revealed that the defects mostly strongly suppresses the electron conductance, and deteriorates the thermoelectric performance of a CNT. By plugging in the results and the intertube-junction properties into the network model, we further show that the defects with realistic concentrations can significantly degrade the thermoelectric performance of CNT-based networks. Our findings indicate the importance of the purification of CNTs for improving CNT-based thermoelectrics.