Optical limiting and nonlinear optical properties of gold-decorated graphene nanocomposites

Metal nanoparticle-decorated low dimensional materials can synergistically combine the nonlinear optical properties of metallic/inorganic nanostructures for enhancing the optical limiting performance. While many materials exhibit excellent optical limiting performance at a relatively higher fluence (>9 J/cm2), there is a still a dearth of optical limiting materials for protecting low damage threshold (<1 J/cm2) photonic devices. Although metal nanoparticle-decorated graphene hybrids are expected to resolve this issue, the rehybridization of metal d-orbitals and graphene p-orbitals often lead to undesirable changes in graphene's electronic structure which adversely affect the nonlinear optical performance. Here, we demonstrate that d-orbitals of Au nanoparticles exhibit little or no rehybridization with graphene and result in an enhanced optical limiting behavior at a low fluence of ∼0.4 J/cm2, which is lower than most metal decorated graphene, carbon nanotube nanocomposites and metal nanoparticles. This optical limiting performance at a lower fluence is attributed to the excellent photo-absorption of Au nanoparticles combined with rapid thermalization of excited carriers by graphene.