Surfactant mediated synthesis of structured metal nanoparticle by pulsed laser ablation for photocatalysis

Metal nanoparticles fabricated from chemical methods exhibit various excellent properties with their unique physicochemical properties and structures. To address the problems of the complicated manufacturing process and the side products generation, laser ablation in aqueous environment is proposed as a facile and environment friendly method to fabricate nanoparticles, producing very limited impurities. Ag, TiO2 and Ag/TiO2 composite nanoparticles are fabricated under the irradiation of pulsed laser with surfactant dodecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (DTAB) as the stabilizer. Assembly shape of surfactants could be tuned by controllable concentrations, resulting in different nanostructures of nanoparticles. The laser processing parameters and the stabilizer showed collaborative effect on the morphology design of metal colloid nanoparticles. SEM images showed different morphologies of Ag nanoparticles and evenly distributed TiO2 nanoparticles are obtained. Typical silver crystals and rutile titanium dioxide crystals was characterized by XRD patterns. The UV-visible spectrum reflected the effects of Ag nanoparticles synthesized under different concentrations of DTAB on the absorption wavelengths of silver and titanium dioxide composites.