Plasmon-Assisted Energy Transfer in Hybrid Nanosystems

While direct optical excitation of carbon nanotubes activates only the tube species strictly matching the excitation source, excitation energy transfer processes provide a single excitation channel for all the nanotubes species in a sample. The requirement of an overlap between donor emission and acceptor absorption limits the poll of donors able to trasfer their excitation to the tubes, leaving the high-energy part of the solar spectrum excluded from such processes. Here it is shown that the grafting of small metal nanoparticles to the tubes alters those rules, enabling energy transfer process from molecules for which the standard energy transfer process is strongly suppressed. The onset of an energy transfer band in the UV/blue spectral region is demonstrated for an hybrid gold-pyrene-nanotube system, yielding collective emission from all the tubes present in our samples upon excitation of pyrene.