Partial quenching of electronic Raman scattering in double-wall carbon nanotubes by interlayer coupling
Abstract
Measuring electronic Raman scattering (ERS) has become an efficient method for structural characterization of
metallic single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT). However, applying this method to other types of SWCNT-based
structures, e.g., those with strong van der Waals (VDW) coupling, is currently not well studied. In this work, we
combine electron diffraction, Rayleigh and Raman spectroscopies to investigate the ERS process near 36 metallic
transitions in 21 individual double-wall carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) with all types of electronic configurations.
We observe the partial suppression of ERS intensity in DWCNTs compared to SWCNTs and mainly attribute it to
the effect of dielectric screening of Coulomb interactions. We probe ultra-pure macroscopic multi-chirality
DWCNT solutions and identify the role of inhomogeneous broadening in observing ERS peaks in Raman
spectra. Based on the experimental findings, we propose an adapted method for the structural identification of
DWCNT samples from the ERS data. The obtained results can be generalized to the characterization of the
emerging 1D VDW heterostructures based on metallic SWCNTs