Picosecond Reverse Saturable Absorption and Optical Limiting in Fullerenes and Their Metal Derivatives

Investigations of the reverse saturable absorption behaviour of Fullerenes C 60 and C 70 and some of their Pt and Pd metal derivatives have been carried out with picosecond pulses at 532 nm. From intensity dependent transmission measurements, coupled with a population level kinetic analysis, excited state cross sections were determined for the materials. These show that C 60 possesses the largest excited state to ground state cross-section ratio and that, of the materials studied, it offers the best optical limiting ability around 532 nm. C 70, due to its large ground state absorption, has been shown not to be an efficient limiter. The metal derivatives perform better than C 70 but less efficiently than C 60.