Super-Resolution Fluorescence Imaging of Carbon Nanotubes Using a Nonlinear Excitonic Process

Abstract

Highly efficient exciton-exciton annihilation process unique to one-dimensional systems is utilized for super-resolution imaging of air-suspended carbon nanotubes. Through the comparison of fluorescence signals in linear and sublinear regimes at different excitation powers, we extract the efficiency of the annihilation processes using conventional confocal microscopy. Spatial images of the annihilation rate of the excitons have resolution beyond the diffraction limit. We investigate excitation power dependence of the annihilation processes by experiment and Monte Carlo simulation, and the resolution improvement of the annihilation images can be quantitatively explained by the superlinearity of the annihilation process. We have also developed another method in which the cubic dependence of the annihilation rate on exciton density is utilized to achieve further sharpening of single nanotube images.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Nonlinear Photoluminescence in Atomically Thin Layered WSe2 Arising from Diffusion-Assisted Exciton-Exciton Annihilation
• Exciton diffusion in air-suspended single-walled carbon nanotubes
• Exciton diffusion, end quenching, and exciton-exciton annihilation in individual air-suspended carbon nanotubes
• Room-temperature single photon emission from micron-long air-suspended carbon nanotubes
• Influences of Exciton Diffusion and Exciton-Exciton Annihilation on Photon Emission Statistics of Carbon Nanotubes
• Existence of an upper limit on the density of excitons in carbon nanotubes by diffusion-limited exciton-exciton annihilation: Experiment and theory
• Gate-controlled generation of optical pulse trains using individual carbon nanotubes