Auger Suppression of Nanotube Incandescence in Individual Suspended CNT pn-junctions

There are various mechanisms of light emission in carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which give rise to a wide range of spectral characteristics that provide important information. Here, we report suppression of incandescence via Auger recombination in suspended carbon nanotube pn-junctions generated from dual-gate CNT field effect transistor (FET) devices. By applying equal and opposite voltages to the gate electrodes (i.e., Vg1 = -Vg2), we create a pn-junction within the CNT. Under these gating conditions, we observe a sharp peak in the incandescence intensity around zero applied gate voltage, where the intrinsic region has the largest spatial extent. Here, the emission occurs under high electrical power densities around 0.1MW/cm2 (or 6µW) and arises from thermal emission at elevated temperatures above 800K (i.e., incandescence). It is somewhat surprising that this thermal emission intensity is so sensitive to the gating conditions, and we observe a 1000-fold suppression of light emission between Vg1=0V and Vg1=1...