Lossless synthesis of graphene nanosheets decorated with tiny cadmium sulfide quantum dots with excellent nonlinear optical properties

The implantation and growth of metal nanoparticles on graphene nanosheets (GNS) leads directly to severe damage to the regular structure of the graphene sheets, which disrupts the extended p conjugation, resulting in an impaired device performance. In this paper, we describe a facile approach for achieving the lossless formation of graphene composite decorated with tiny cadmium sulfide quantum dots (QDs) with excellent nonlinear optical properties by using benzyl mercaptan (BM) as the interlinker. The mercapto substituent of BM binds to the CdS QDs during their nucleation and growth process, and then the phenyl comes into contact with the GNS via the pi-pi stacking interaction. Using this strategy, CdS QDs with an average diameter of 3 nm are uniformly dispersed over the surface of graphene, and the resulting QD-graphene composite exhibits excellent optical limiting properties, mainly contributed by nonlinear scattering and nonlinear absorption, upon both 532 and 1064 nm excitations, in the nanosecond laser pulse regime.