Optical Activity in Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.pdfVIP

Optical Activity in Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Seongwoo Yoo, Yongmin Jung, Dong Soo Lee, Won-Taek Han, and Kyunghwan Oh Department of Information and Communications, GIST, 1 Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-712, Korea +82-62-970-2213(T), +82-62-970-2237(F), koh@gist.ac.kr Y. Murakami, T. Edamura, Shigeo Maruyama Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan Optical activity was observed in films of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). We report the control of both the polarization state and transmission of incoming light at 1550nm by azimuthal and axial tilting of SWNT film about its aligned axis. The experiments reveal that the polarization state of light is susceptible to the azimuthal angle of aligned direction of SWNT having semi-conductor characteristics and the intensity of output beam after SWNT film shows cosine function dependence on axial tilting angle. ©2005 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 260.5430, 240.0310, 060.2340 1 1. Introduction Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) have been the subject of focused interdisciplinary studies due to their unique electrical, mechanical and thermal properties that could lead to wide and versatile applications.1 However in optical perspectives SWNT characterization studies, not to mention practical applications, have been limited and it is only recent that SWNT could find applications in saturable absorbers for mode locking of erbium doped silica fiber lasers.2,3 In terms of fabrication process of SWNT, significant improvements in the tube growth direction control have been