Nanomaterials via Laser Ablation/Irradiation in Liquid: A Review

Abstract

Laser ablation of solid targets in the liquid medium can be realized to fabricate nanostructures with various compositions (metals, alloys, oxides, carbides, hydroxides, etc.) and morphologies (nanoparticles, nanocubes, nanorods, nanocomposites, etc.). At the same time, the post laser irradiation of suspended nanomaterials can be applied to further modify their size, shape, and composition. Such fabrication and modification of nanomaterials in liquid based on laser irradiation has become a rapidly growing field. Compared to other, typically chemical, methods, laser ablation/irradiation in liquid (LAL) is a simple and “green” technique that normally operates in water or organic liquids under ambient conditions. Recently, the LAL has been elaborately developed to prepare a series of nanomaterials with special morphologies, microstructures and phases, and to achieve one‐step formation of various functionalized nanostructures in the pursuit of novel properties and applications in optics, display, detection, and biological fields. The formation mechanisms and synthetic strategies based on LAL are systematically analyzed and the reported nanostructures derived from the unique characteristics of LAL are highlighted along with a review of their applications and future challenges.

Coating matters: the influence of coating materials on the optical properties of gold nanoparticles

“…in Egypt and China [1] , but scientifi c research on colloidal gold started in 1857 with Michael Faraday ' s report on the formation of deep red solutions of gold in water by the reduction of an aqueous solution of chloroaurate (AuCl 4 -) using phosphorus in CS 2 (a two-phase system) [2] . Since then, especially in the 20th century, many different methods for the preparation of gold nanoparticles have been reported, including top-down techniques [3 -5] such as photolithography [6] , electron beam lithography [7,8] or laser-ablation techniques [3,9] , as well as bottom-up methods, mainly comprising various types of reduction in solution (chemical [10 -12] , electrochemical [13,14] , sonochemical [15 -17] , and photochemical [18 -21] reduction) and few other approaches such as templating and seeded-growth methods [11, 22 -25] . Among all these different approaches developed for the fabrication of gold nanoparticles, wet chemistry promises to become the preferred choice, because of its relative simplicity, possible scale-up and use of inexpensive resources.…”

Synthesis of blue-shifted luminescent colloidal GaN nanocrystals through femtosecond pulsed laser ablation in organic solution

“…The size distribution is obtained from TEM images by considering 150 nanoparticles. The power density in the order of 10 8 W/cm 2 in our experiment corresponds to the lower limit of the vapor and plasma generation range (Zeng et al 2012). The resultant NPs are smaller in size compared to the ones in Liu et al (2008) work in which two orders of magnitude with higher power density applied.…”

“…Recently, quantum-confined cubic GaN nanoparticles with the size of 3-4 nm have been synthesized by Gyger et al (2014) via liquid-ammonia-in-oil-microemulsions. Laser ablation method is also a promising technique to generate a wide variety of metal and semiconductor nanoparticles (Yang 2012;Alkis et al 2012;Zeng et al 2012). Unlike GaN nanostructures obtained by chemical methods (Yang et al 1999;Sardar and Rao 2004;Ganesh et al 2010;Chirico and Hector 2010), with laser ablation it is possible to produce chemical-free and clean nanomaterials which can be used in biomedical applications (Petersen and Barcikowski 2009;Wu et al 2011).…”

“…The laser ablation of solids in liquid environment compared to dilute gas or vacuum needs simple setup for the generation of nanoparticles. Moreover, it allows advanced and functional nanoparticle production (Liu et al 2010;Zeng et al 2012;Barcikowski and Compagnini 2013). The properties of laser-generated nanoparticles depend on various experimental considerations such as liquid material properties, laser parameters, and laser-material interaction conditions (Mafuné et al 2000;Barcikowski et al 2007).…”

Colloidal Stability of Metal Nanoparticles in Engine Oil under Thermal and Mechanical Load

“…The particles in the supernatant were washed with chloroform, dried, and added to the oil [4]. An alternative one-step method to produce nanoparticles in oil is obtained by the method of pulsed laser ablation in liquids [20][21][22][23][24]. Depending on nanoparticle material and liquid, these laser-generated nanoparticles are highly dispersed and stable.…”