Photophysical properties of semiconducting armchair-edge grapheme nanoribbons

One-dimensional (1D) graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are promising materials for future electronics and optoelectronics. Their versatility in electronic properties makes it possible to use them as an active element in devices with a tunable band gap. Different from graphene, armchair-edge GNRs (AGNRs) are semiconducting with a direct bandgap [1-3]. However, until now their photophysical characterization has not been addressed properly due to the metal substrate on which they are grown. The substrate hinders measurements such as transmission and photoluminescence (PL). Here we transfer AGNRs with a width of N = 7 atoms from Au(788) to insulating substrates using an alignment-preserving method and investigate their photoluminescence properties.