nanostructures. However, these nanostructures have strongly anisotropic mechanical properties originated from their shapes. Furthermore, various nanocomposites using nanoparticles [3] or nanosheets [4] as fillers have been extensively studied because of their designable mechanical properties. However, direct studies on the mechanical properties of smaller 0D nanoparticles have been quite limited so far.Sub-micrometer spherical particles can be synthesized by applying pulsed laser irradiation onto raw colloidal nanoparticles dispersed in a liquid medium as a new type of 0D nanoparticles. This technique is referred to as pulsed laser melting in liquid (PLML). [5][6][7][8] In this process, raw nanoparticles are selectively heated and melted by unfocused pulsed laser irradiation to form droplets due to the temperature increase over the melting point. Raw nanoparticles are generally aggregated in liquid, and therefore aggregates merge into large sub-micrometersized droplets during instantaneous laser heating. Subsequently, generated droplets are quenched by the surrounding liquid to become highly crystalline nonporous sub-micrometer spherical particles. Sub-micrometer-sized particles are obtained due to the balance between the size-dependent optical absorption efficiency of particles and the heat capacity of the material to reach the melting point. [9,10] Using this technique, sub-micrometer spherical particles can be fabricated for various materials, such as metals, [11,12] oxides, [13,14] semiconductors, [15] and even carbides. [7,16] As commercially available sub-micrometer spherical particles are Sub-micrometer spherical particles that are obtained by pulsed laser melting in liquid (PLML) are usually observed to be single crystalline, and it is suggested that they are mechanically very strong. In this study, fracture tests of various sub-micrometer spherical particles are performed by compressive force application. The results indicate that B 4 C and TiO 2 sub-micrometer spherical particles exhibit brittle fracture behavior under tensile fracture mode at the center of the particles. The fracture strength of the sub-micrometer spherical particles is larger than that of the bulk material reported in the literature by about one order of magnitude. TiO 2 sub-micrometer spherical particles obtained by PLML are stronger than the commercially available TiO x sub-micrometer spherical particles with a porous structure. In addition, due to the single crystallinity of particles, smaller particles have larger fracture strength, becoming up to 10-40% of ideal tensile fracture strength calculated based on density functional theory. Thus, these results demonstrate that sub-micrometer spherical particles obtained using PLML exhibit fairly strong and unique mechanical properties, and therefore they are very promising for various mechanical applications at the sub-micrometer size scale.
Fracture Strength AnalysisThe ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.org/10.1002/ppsc.2018...