Optical Properties of Flowing Carbon Nanotube Suspensions
Abstract
We use depolarized shear light scattering, flow birefringence, flow dichroism, and optical microscopy to measure the optical properties of dilute and semi-dilute multi-walled carbon nanotube suspensions in highly elastic polymer melts under simple shear flow. Strong flow alignment of the tubes allows us to extract a measure of information about the real and imaginary pats of the polarizability along and normal to the nanotube axis, giving quantitative information about the optical anisotropy of individual tubes. We develop a first principles macroscopic theory of the optical anisotropy of flowing carbon nanotube suspensions which we apply to our measurements, and we compare our findings with results quoted in the literature.
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004APS..MAR.C1058F