Electronic Raman Scattering in Suspended Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube

The electronic Raman scattering (ERS) features of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) can reveal a wealth of information about their electronic structures. Previously, the ERS processes have been exclusively reported in metallic SWNTs (M-SWNTs) and attributed to the inelastic scattering of photoexcited excitons by a continuum of low-energy electron–hole pairs near the Fermi level. Therefore, the ERS features have been thought to appear exclusively in M-SWNTs but not in semiconducting SWNTs (S-SWNTs), which are more desired in many application fields such as nanoelectronics and bioimaging. In this work, the experimental observation of the ERS features in suspended S-SWNTs is reported, the processes of which are accomplished via the available high-energy electron–hole pairs. The excitonic transition energies with an uncertainty in the order of ±1 meV can be directly obtained via the ERS spectra, compared to a typical uncertainty of ±10 meV in conventional electronic spectroscopies. The ERS features can facilitate further systematic studies on the properties of SWNT, both metallic and semiconducting, with defined chirality.