Measurement of a Reaction-Diffusion Crossover in Exciton-Exciton Recombination inside Carbon Nanotubes Using Femtosecond Optical Absorption

J. Allam, M. T. Sajjad, R. Sutton, K. Litvinenko, Z. Wang, S. Siddique, Q.-H. Yang, W. H. Loh and T. Brown. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 197401, 2013.

Abstract

Exciton-exciton recombination in isolated semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes was studied using femtosecond transient absorption. Under sufficient excitation to saturate the optical absorption, we observed an abrupt transition between reaction- and diffusion-limited kinetics, arising from reactions between incoherent localized excitons with a finite probability of ?0.2??per encounter. This represents the first experimental observation of a crossover between classical and critical kinetics in a 1D coalescing random walk, which is a paradigm for the study of nonequilibrium systems.