Abstract
There are continued efforts to process and join single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in order to exploit their exceptional functional properties for real-world applications. In this work, we report experimental observations of femtosecond laser irradiation on SWCNTs, in order to process and join them through an efficient and cost-effective technique. The nanotubes were deagglomerated in ethanol by an ultrasonicator and thin slurries of SWCNTs were spread evenly on glass substrates. A laser micromachining workstation for laboratory FemtoLAB (workshop of photonics) has been employed to irradiate the different SWCNTs film samples. The effect of laser parameters, such as pulse wavelength, laser power, etc., were systematically tuned to see the possibility of joining the SWCNTs ropes. Several experiments have been performed to optimize the parameters on different samples of SWCNTs. In general, the nanotubes were mostly damaged by the infrared (1st harmonics femtosecond laser) irradiation on the focal plane. However, the less damaging effect was observed for second harmonics (green wavelength) irradiation. The results suggest some joining of nanotubes along the sides of the focus plane, as well as on the center at the brink of nanotubes. The joining is considered to be established within the region of the high field intensity of the exposed femtosecond laser beam.
Highlights
In recent years, the femtosecond laser appeared as a powerful technique to investigate laser matter interactions for micromachining, surface modification, laser surgery, nanostructure generation, structural evolutions, etc. [1,2]
The as received singlewall wallcarbon carbonnanotube nanotube (SWCNT) were characterized by the transmission and scanning electron microscopy before femtosecond laser irradiation
The representative high-resolution transmission electron microscope (TEM) image of SWCNT ropes and the typical scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of SWCNT networks are shown in Figure 2a,b, respectively
Summary
The femtosecond laser appeared as a powerful technique to investigate laser matter interactions for micromachining, surface modification, laser surgery, nanostructure generation, structural evolutions, etc. [1,2]. The femtosecond laser appeared as a powerful technique to investigate laser matter interactions for micromachining, surface modification, laser surgery, nanostructure generation, structural evolutions, etc. Several studies were performed on the joining of different materials with a laser beam in the form of bulk, as well as powder, at the nano and micron scales [2,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Zhou et al joined Al and Fe nanoparticles by exposing them to multiple femtosecond laser pulses [15]. Zolotovskaya and coworkers reported a scalable technique by demonstrating fast and robust joining of clear glass to glass surface, which contained randomly distributed and embedded spherical silver nanoparticles through the irradiation
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