Abstract
The relaxation dynamics of unaligned multi-walled carbon nanotubes decorated with metallic nanoparticles have been studied by using transient optical measurements. The fast dynamics due to the short-lived free-charge carriers excited by the pump are not affected by the presence of nanoparticles. Conversely, a second long dynamics, absent in bare carbon nanotubes, appears only in the decorated samples. A combination of experiment and theory allows us to ascribe this long dynamics to relaxation channels involving electronic states localized at the tube-nanoparticle interface.
Highlights
Deriving their optical properties from excitonic excited states, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are strong absorbers of light from the near-infrared to the ultraviolet [1,2,3]
Employing ultrafast time-resolved optical spectroscopy, we find an increase, with respect to the pristine CNTs, of the fast dynamics signal coming from the photoexcitation of the additional static charge
While the sign of the transient response of the bare multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) is positive for all the delay times, the signal of the decorated ones is positive at the beginning and becomes negative for longer delay times
Summary
Deriving their optical properties from excitonic excited states, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are strong absorbers of light from the near-infrared to the ultraviolet [1,2,3]. The integration of CNTs into hybrid architectures shows an enhanced ability to trap electrons and reduce the ultrafast electron–hole recombination, which eventually provides a new way to modulate and improve the performance of CNT-based light-harvesting devices. Among these hybrid systems, CNTs decorated with metal nanoparticles (NPs) have recently attracted much attention within a wide range of applications [9,10,11] including gas sensors [12,13,14,15] and catalysis [16] as well as optoelectronic and light-energy conversion devices [17,18,19,20]
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