Résumé
Semiconducting single wall carbon nanotubes (s-SWNT) are unique monodimensional material of particular interest in photonics for their direct band-gap, allowing tunable near-IR luminescence from electron-hole recombinaison. However, the presence of metallic nanotubes and impurities in real carbon nanotubes samples creates several non radiative relaxation mechanisms, leading to an effective quenching of s-SWNT photoluminescence and limiting their usability in photonics devices. Recently, we have developed a process to selectively extract s-SWNT and embedded them in polyfluorene (PFO) thin films. A removal of metallic nanotubes leads to an enhancement of the photoluminescence properties, with a 6-fold increase of the photoluminescence intensity of (8,6) s-SWNT. Development of nanotubes based photonics devices is also reported. The SWNT-based layer was inserted between two Bragg mirrors to form a Fabry-Perot cavity, leading to a huge photoluminescence enhancement by a factor of 30 in comparison with an identical film and by a factor of 180 in comparison with a non s-SWNT enriched film.