Unveiling Fundamentals of Multi-Beam Pulsed Laser Ablation in Liquids toward Scaling up Nanoparticle Production

Abstract

Pulsed laser ablation in liquids (PLAL) is a versatile technique to produce high-purity colloidal nanoparticles. Despite considerable recent progress in increasing the productivity of the technique, there is still significant demand for a practical, cost-effective method for upscaling PLAL synthesis. Here we employ and unveil the fundamentals of multi-beam (MB) PLAL. The MB-PLAL upscaling approach can bypass the cavitation bubble, the main limiting factor of PLAL efficiency, by splitting the laser beam into several beams using static diffractive optical elements (DOEs). A multimetallic high-entropy alloy CrFeCoNiMn was used as a model material and the productivity of its nanoparticles in the MB-PLAL setup was investigated and compared with that in the standard single-beam PLAL. We demonstrate that the proposed multi-beam method helps to bypass the cavitation bubble both temporally (lower pulse repetition rates can be used while keeping the optimum processing fluence) and spatially (lower beam scanning speeds are needed) and thus dramatically increases the nanoparticle yield. Time-resolved imaging of the cavitation bubble was performed to correlate the observed production efficiencies with the bubble bypassing. The results suggest that nanoparticle PLAL productivity at the level of g/h can be achieved by the proposed multi-beam strategy using compact kW-class lasers and simple inexpensive scanning systems.

Laser synthesis of nanoparticles in organic solvents – products, reactions, and perspectives

“…Moreover, huge quantities are demanded already for throughput screening of alloy nanoparticle series [ 196 ], at the gram-to-kilogram scale of supported catalyst, which equals hundreds of milligrams to grams of nanoparticles per sample [ 197 ], depending on catalyst loading. Although there is work on high-productivity setups [ 5 , 70 , 198 ], these setups work with water. But typical organic liquids have lower vapor pressure, lower heat capacity, and higher viscosity, attenuating productivity by larger cavitation bubbles that stick in ellipsoidal shape on the target surface even after collapse [ 199 ], persistent microbubbles, and gaseous by-products that shield the laser beam.…”