Optical Extinction Spectroscopy for characterization of metal nanoparticles fabricated by laser ablation

D. MUÑETÓN; J. M. J. SANTILLÁN; D. C. SCHINCA; L. B. SCAFFARDI

Pucón

Congreso; IX Reunión Iberoamericana de Óptica RIAO/OPTILAS 2016; 2016

Colloidal suspensions of metal nanoparticles (NPs) have been an active area of research due to their many applications in sciences, engineering and biomedicine like diagnosis and treatment of illnesses, everyday uten-sils with antibactertial and autocleaning properties [1], ductility and elastici-ty control of material [2], among others. ĺ ese applications are directly bounded to the size and structure of the NPs [3]. For this rea-son, diff er-ent chemical and physical techniques were developed by several groups for a controlled fabrication of metal colloids. Among the latter, femtosecond laser ablation is frequently used to synthesize spherical NPs with typical sizes less than 20 nm [4].Characterization of the colloidal suspensions so ob-tained is traditionally carried out using electron mi-croscopy (TEM, SEM) or atomic force microscopy (AFM). However, these techniques have the drawback of needing a large number of measurements to yield sta-tistically reliable results. During the past years, our group has been working on the characterization of NPs by Optical Extinction Spec-troscopy (OES), re ning this technique for the determi-nation of size, structure and concentration of metal NPs. ĺ e number of probed NPs is in the order of 1011, high enough statis-tics to ensure statistically reliable results. In this work we show the application of this technique to characterize silver, copper and nickel NPs fabricated by fs laser ablation of solid targets in liquids.