Probing Phonon Dynamics in Individual Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes

Interactions between elementary excitations, such as carriers, phonons, and plasmons, are critical for understanding the optical and electronic properties of materials. The significance of these interactions is more prominent in low-dimensional materials and can dominate their physical properties due to the enhanced interactions between these excitations. One-dimensional single-walled carbon nanotubes provide an ideal system for studying such interactions due to their perfect physical structures and rich electronic properties. Here we investigated G-mode phonon dynamics in individual suspended chirality-resolved single-walled carbon nanotubes by time-resolved anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy. The improved technique allowed us to probe the intrinsic phonon information on a single-tube level and exclude the influences of tube–tube and tube–substrate interactions. We found that the G-mode phonon lifetime ranges from 0.75–2.25 ps and critically depends on whether the tube is metallic or semiconducting. In comparison with the phonon lifetimes in graphene and graphite, we revealed structure-dependent carrier–phonon and phonon–phonon interactions in nanotubes. Our results provide new information for optimizing the design of nanotube electronic/optoelectronic devices by better understanding and utilizing their phonon decay channels