Plasmonic enhancement of aligned semiconducting graphene nanoribbons

TL;DR

This study demonstrates significant plasmonic enhancement of photoluminescence and Raman signals in semiconducting graphene nanoribbons, enabling detailed spectral analysis and coherence property investigation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to enhance and analyze Raman and photoluminescence signals in graphene nanoribbons using plasmonic nanoantenna arrays, revealing coherence lengths.

Findings

Enhanced photoluminescence and Raman signals by over tenfold.

Detection of off-resonant Raman signals from modified modes.

Estimation of coherence length in graphene nanoribbons.

Abstract

We couple photoluminescent semiconducting 7-atom wide armchair edge graphene nanoribbons to plasmonic nanoantenna arrays and demonstrate an enhancement of the photoluminescence and Raman scattering intensity of the nanoribbons by more than one order of magnitude. The increase in signal allows us to study Raman spectra with high signal-to-noise ratio. Using plasmonic enhancement we are able to detect the off-resonant Raman signals from the modified radial breathing-like mode (RBLM) due to physisorbed molecules, the 3rd order RBLM, and C-H vibrations. We find excellent agreement between data and simulations describing the spectral dependence of the enhancement and modifications of the polarization anisotropy. The strong field gradients in the optical near-field further allow us to probe the subwavelength coherence properties of the phonon modes in the nanoribbons. We theoretically model this considering a finite coherence length along the GNR direction. Our results allow estimating the coherence length in graphene nanoribbons.