Facile synthesis of tellurium nanowires and study of their third-order nonlinear optical properties

Abstract

We report on the synthesis of single-crystalline tellurium nanowires with different aspect-ratios prepared via facile surfactant-assisted synthesis under mild conditions. Short and long Te nanowires were synthesized by the reduction of tellurium dioxide by hypophosphorous acid with the assistance of polyoxyethylene (23) laurylether and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide, respectively. We obtained uniform single-crystal Te nanowires with diameter below 30 nm and tunable length from 600 nm to 5 μm. Short and long Te nanowires showed remarkable nonlinear absorption and their third-order nonlinear optical properties were investigated by the Z-scan technique with single 80 ps laser pulses at 532 nm. For the first time, it was observed a distinguished switching behavior from saturated absorption to reverse saturated absorption as a function of the laser intensity in one-dimensional Te nanostructures. Although both short and long Te nanowires display such interesting behavior, the short ones exhibited superior optical limiting performance.