Light emission characterization from multiwalled carbon nanotubes under CO2 laser irradiation

Abstract

Light emission from multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) under CO2 laser irradiation is investigated in this paper. MWNTs act like an incandescent lamp when irradiated by CO2 laser. For aligned MWNTs, both the spectra and the irradiance of the light emission were found to be relevant to the angle between laser incident direction and nanotube axis, which was attributed to the anisotropic property of aligned MWNTs. The above relationship was not observed from unaligned MWNTs. The angle dependent light emission from aligned MWNTs confirms that the light emission is not fully thermoluminescence but consist of laser-induce luminescence also. Structure investigation shows that there is no obvious structural change by laser irradiation.