Optical Limiting Properties of Two Soluble Polymer/Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube Composites

Two soluble polymer grafted multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), including poly(N-vinylcarbazole)-MWNTs and poly(methyl methacrylate)-MWNTs, are synthesized. Their nonlinear optical properties and optical
limiting (OL) performances are investigated by z-scan method with 527nm nanosecond laser pulses. These grafted MWNTs dissolved in chloroform show much better optical limiting performance than those of MWNTs and C₆₀ in toluene solution. Nonlinear absorption and nonlinear scattering mechanism are taken into consideration for explaining the observed results. The comparison of the experimental results shows that nonlinear absorption is the dominant mechanism for OL performance of these new samples.