Abstract
Femtosecond one-color pump-probe spectroscopy was applied to study exciton dynamics in single-crystal copper-phthalocyanine (CuPc) nanowires grown on an opaque silicon substrate. The transient reflectance kinetics measured at different pump fluences exhibit a remarkable intensity-dependent decay behavior which accelerates significantly with increasing pump pulse intensity. All the kinetic decays can be satisfactorily described using a bi-exponential decay function with lifetimes of 22 and 204 ps, and corresponding relative amplitudes depending on the pump intensity. The accelerated decay behavior observed at high pump intensities arises from a nonlinear exciton-exciton annihilation process. While this phenomenon has been found previously in crystalline metallophthalocyanine (MPc) polymorphs such as colloidal particles and thin films, the results obtained using the CuPc nanowires are markedly distinct, namely, much longer decay times and a linear intensity dependence of the initial peak amplitudes. Despite these differences, detailed data analysis further shows that, as found for other metal-phthalocyanine polymorphs, exciton-exciton annihilation in the CuPc nanowires is one-dimensional (1D) diffusion-limited, which possibly involves intra-chain exciton diffusion along 1D molecular stacks. The significantly long-lived excitons of CuPc nanowires in comparison to those of other crystalline polymorphs make them particularly suitable for photovoltaic applications.
