Designing hybrid graphene oxide- gold nanoparticles for nonlinear optical response: Experiment and theory

Abstract

Nonlinear optical absorption of light by materials are weak due to its perturbative nature, although a strong nonlinear response is of crucial importance to applications in optical limiting and switching. Here we demonstrate experimentally and theoretically an extremely efficient scheme of excited state absorption by charge transfer between donor and acceptor materials as the new method to enhance the nonlinear absorption by orders of magnitude. With this idea, we have demonstrated strong excited state absorption (ESA) in reduced graphene oxide that otherwise shows increased transparency at high fluence and enhancement of ESA by one orders of magnitude in graphene oxide by attaching gold nanoparticles (AuNP) in the tandem configuration that acts as an efficient charge transfer pair when excited at the plasmonic wavelength. To explain the unprecedented enhancement, we have developed a five-level rate equation model based on the charge transfer between the two materials and numerically simulated the results. To understand the correlation of interfacial charge-transfer with the concentration and type of the functional ligands attached to the graphene oxide sheet, we have investigated the AuNP-graphene oxide interface with various possible ligand configurations from first-principles calculations. By using the strong ESA of our hybrid materials, we have fabricated liquid cell-based high-performance optical limiters with important device parameters better than that of the benchmark optical limiters.

References in corpus (6)

• The SIESTA method for ab initio order-N materials simulation
• Efficient index handling of multidimensional periodic boundary conditions
• Determination of Effective Permittivity and Permeability of Metamaterials from Reflection and Transmission Coefficients
• Direct Observationof DegenerateTwo-Photon Absorption and Its Saturation in WS2 and MoS2 Monolayer and Few-Layer Films
• Optical Limiting and Theoretical Modelling of Layered Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Nanosheets
• Observation of Saturable and Reverse Saturable Absorption at Longitudinal Surface Plasmon Resonance in Gold Nanorods

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quantification of nonlinear absorption in ternary As-Sb-Se chalcogenide glasses
• Combinatorial Large-area MoS2/Anatase-TiO2 interface: A Pathway to Emergent Optical and Opto-electronic Functionalities
• Unveiling and engineering of third order optical nonlinearities in NiCo${}_2$O${}_4$ nanoflowers
• Near resonant nanosecond laser driven nonlinear optical response in As50S50 thin films