Phonon softening and crystallographic orientation of strained graphene studied by Raman spectroscopy.

We present a systematic study of the Raman spectra of optical phonons in graphene monolayers under tunable uniaxial tensile stress. Both the G and 2D bands exhibit significant red shifts. The G band splits into 2 distinct subbands (G(+), G(-)) because of the strain-induced symmetry breaking.

Orientational motions of vibrational chromophores in molecules at the air/water interface with time-resolved sum frequency generation.

The first time-resolved experiments in which interfacial molecules are pumped to excited electronic states and probed by vibrational sum frequency generation (SFG) are reported. This method was used to measure the out-of-plane rotation dynamics, i.e.

Direct measurement of the lifetime of optical phonons in single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Time-resolved anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy has been applied to probe the dynamics of optical phonons created in single-walled carbon nanotubes by femtosecond laser excitation. From measurement of the decay of the anti-Stokes Raman signal in semiconducting nanotubes of (6,5) chiral index, a room-temperature lifetime for G-mode phonons of 1.1+/-0.

Structural dependence of excitonic optical transitions and band-gap energies in carbon nanotubes.

The optical transitions of semiconducting carbon nanotubes have been ascribed to excitons. Here we use two-photon excitation spectroscopy to measure exciton binding energies, as well as band-gap energies, in a range of individual species of semiconducting SWNTs. Exciton binding energies are large and vary inversely with nanotube diameter, as predicted by theory.