Abstract
We demonstrate the unprecedented chemical imaging of individual constituents in a four-component sample made of several carbon allotropes: single-wall carbon nanotubes, graphene oxide, C60 fullerene, and an organic residue. This represents a significant advance with respect to previous works that were mainly limited to systems with one or two components having very different chemical composition. Despite the spectral and spatial overlap from different components, plasmon-based nanospectroscopy allows the discrimination of all individual carbon nanomaterials here investigated. Among other physical insights such as doping observed in carbon nanotubes, the detailed chemical imaging of graphene oxide reveals higher defect concentration at the flake edges similarly to the case of graphene. We found that the organic residue has either low adsorption or lack of resonant enhancement on GO, in contrast to graphene, suggesting a decreased van der Waals interaction. This report paves the way for routine nanoscale analysis of complex carbon systems with spatial resolution of 15 nm and below.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 588-593 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Carbon |
| Volume | 96 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2016 |
Funding
Authors warmly thank Andrey Krayev (AIST-NT, Inc.) for the sample preparation and invaluable help with the TERS experiments. The team from Germany is grateful to the DFG Research Unit 1713 SMINT and the Cluster of Excellence for Advanced Electronics Dresden (cfaed) for financial support. The US team acknowledges financial support by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) , Office of Science , Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under Award #ERKCC02. This work was performed in the context of the European COST Action MP1302 Nanospectroscopy.