Robin Nicholas

Abstract:

Solubilizing and purifying carbon nanotubes remains one of the foremost technological hurdles in their investigation and application. We report a dramatic improvement in the preparation of single-walled carbon nanotube solutions based on the ability of specific aromatic polymers to efficiently disperse certain nanotube species with a high degree of selectivity. Evidence of this is provided by optical absorbance and photoluminescence excitation spectra, which show suspensions corresponding to up to approximately 60% relative concentration of a single species of isolated nanotubes with fluorescence quantum yields of up to 1.5%. Different polymers show the ability to discriminate between nanotube species in terms of either diameter or chiral angle. Modelling suggests that rigid-backbone polymers form ordered molecular structures surrounding the nanotubes with n-fold symmetry determined by the tube diameter.

Abstract:

The authors report photoluminescence (PL) measurement on a series of SiSiGe quantum-well structures that had different internal strain distributions. When each sample was placed in a high magnetic field, the field-dependent energy shift of the relevant PL peaks revealed either type-I or type-II exciton formation depending on the strain distribution. This observation is in agreement with theoretical modeling. The present investigation shows that type-I band alignment-desired for electroluminescent devices-can be achieved by strain engineering. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.

Abstract:

We report a detailed study of the magnetophotoluminescence of single-wall carbon nanotubes at various temperatures in fields up to 58 T. We give direct experimental evidence of the diameter dependence of the Aharanov-Bohm phase-induced band gap shifts. Large increases in intensity are produced by the magnetic field at low temperatures which are also significantly chiral index [(n,m)] dependent. These increases are attributed to the magnetic field induced mixing of the wave functions of the exciton states. A study of the emission from nanotubes aligned perpendicular to the applied magnetic field shows even larger field-induced photoluminescence intensity enhancements and unexpectedly large redshifts in band gap energies, not predicted theoretically. © 2007 The American Physical Society.