A comparison of the crystal structure and optical properties of reduced graphene oxide and aminated graphene nanosheets for optoelectronic device applications

Optical properties of graphene transform in presence of amine or amide groups. So, the comparison of the linear and nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) nanosheets and aminated graphene (AMG) nanosheets will significantly accelerate the development of a flexible optoelectronic device based on this material in the future. In this paper, the structural and optical properties of RGO and AMG are investigated by TEM, XRD, Raman, and UV-Vis analysis. TEM images show the formation of the very thin layer of RGO and AMG nanosheets. The peak of XRD spectra (26.6 degrees) for both indicate the good quality of crystallization of RGO and AMG. Raman spectra result in I-D/I-G of about 0.9 and 1.1 for RGO and AMG, respectively. Also, different functional groups for RGO and AMG nanosheets are shown in FTIR spectra. Then, Kramers-Kronig (KK) method was employed to determine the dielectric function, (epsilon) over tilde(lambda), extinction coefficient, k(lambda) and refractive index, n(lambda). Third-order optical nonlinearities of nanosheets dispersed in DMF are investigated with the Z-scan method. The nanosheets achieve an appropriate figure of merit (FOM) due to their high nonlinear refractive (NLR) index, n(2) (10(-8)cm(2)/W) and low nonlinear absorption (NLA) coefficient, beta (10(-4)cm/W).