Nonlinear Optical Properties of Graphene and Carbon Nanotube Composites

Abstract

The rapid development of nanoscience and nanotechnology provides lots of new opportunities for nonlinear optics. A growing number of nanomaterials have been shown to possess remarkable nonlinear optical (NLO) properties, which promotes the design and fabrication of nano and nano-scale optoelectronic and photonic devices (Xia et al. 2003; Avouris et al. 2008; Hasan et al. 2009; Bonaccorso et al. 2010; Loh et al. 2010; Coleman et al. 2011). The wonderful carbon allotropes discovered in recent decades are the most representative products of nanotechnology: from 3D carbon nanoparticles (graphite), to 0D fullerenes, to 1D carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and then to 2D graphenes discovered most recently. Interestingly, all of these nano-carbons exhibit diverse NLO properties. For instance, carbon black suspensions show strong thermally-induced nonlinear scattering (NLS) effect and hence optical limiting (OL) for intense ns laser pulses (Mansour et al. 1992); fullerenes show large third-order optical nonlinearity and reverse saturable absorption (RSA) at certain wavelength band (Tutt et al. 1992); CNTs show ultrafast second- and thirdorder nonlinearities and saturable absorption (SA) in the near infrared (NIR) region (Hasan et al. 2009); and graphenes show ultrafast carrier relaxation time and ultra-broad-band resonate NLO response (Bonaccorso et al. 2010).