Effect of oxygenated functional groups on the photoluminescence properties of graphene-oxide nanosheets

The graphene-oxide (GO) nanosheets were synthesized by varying the degree of oxidation levels in which the observation of different domain size (sp ²) of GO and their relationship in photoluminescence (PL) characteristics were investigated. GO consists of two unique carbon domains sp² and sp³, in which each domain have different charge carrier recombination pathway within the domain. As-prepared GO sample shows the broad emission peak ranging from 350 nm to 600 nm. The PL emission has been tuned from blue to yellow and the emission is directly proportional to corresponding size of sp² cluster. The Gaussian peaks are centered at different wavelength region for various sizes of sp² cluster. While increasing the degree of oxidation, the concentration of functional groups are found to be increased resulting the enlargement of sp² domain size from 15.96 nm to 16.28 nm, due to this, the red shift was observed in the emission spectra. Our results show a basic understanding in photoluminescence characteristics of GO with the effect of oxygenated functional groups.