Heterogeneous Fluorescence Intermittency in Single Layer Reduced Graphene Oxide

Abstract

We provide, for the first time, direct experimental evidence for heterogeneous blinking in reduced graphene oxide (rGO) during photolysis. The spatially resolved intermittency originates from regions within individual rGO sheets and shows 1/f-like power spectral density. We describe the evolution of rGO blinking using the multiple recombination center (MRC) model that captures common features of nanoscale blinking. Our results illustrate the universal nature of blinking and suggest a common microscopic origin for the effect.

Additional Information

© 2015 American Chemical Society. Received: January 16, 2015; Revised: May 21, 2015; Published: June 9, 2015. M.K. thanks the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, the Army Research Office (W911NF-12-1-0578), for support. B.J. was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract W-31-109-Eng-38. We thank Anthony Ruth for valuable discussions in structure and properties of graphene oxide. Author Contributions: A.E., Y.M., and M.P.M performed the experiments. Subsequent data analysis was done under the supervision of M.K. J.S. and S.V.-K. performed the numerical analysis and the phenomenological modeling of the data under the supervision and guidance of B.J. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and the writing of the manuscript. The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Attached Files

Supplemental Material - nl5b00191_si_001.pdf

Supplemental Material - nl5b00191_si_002.avi

Files

Additional details