Suppression of blinking and enhanced exciton emission from individual carbon nanotubes

Nan Ai, William Walden-Newman, Qiang Song, Sokratis Kalliakos, Stefan Strauf

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

43 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2664-2670
Number of pages7
JournalACS Nano
Volume5
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 26 Apr 2011

Keywords

  • excitons
  • fluorescence intermittency
  • power law
  • single-wall carbon nanotubes
  • spectral diffusion

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Suppression of blinking and enhanced exciton emission from individual carbon nanotubes'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this