Production of Nanomaterials by Pulsed Laser Ablation

Nanotechnology has been predicted to change many aspects of our everyday life and revolutionize the way we produce materials. The remarkable size-tunable properties of nanomaterials make them a hot research topic with far-reaching applications ranging from quantum computers to cures for cancer. To achieve these ambitious visions, new production methods need to be developed. In this thesis the production of nanomaterials by pulsed laser ablation is investigated. This work was initially motivated by an interest to test recently developed high repetition rate fibre lasers in pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and pulsed laser ablation in liquids (PLAL). In this work PLD was used to deposit thin films, nanoparticles and high surface area structures. The high repetition rate was observed to have important implications for the quality of the deposited films and the surfaces of the evaporated targets. Nanoparticles produced by conventional chemical synthesis techniques often include unwanted residues from the reactants. These residues can be toxic and detrimental for applications. Nanoparticle production by PLAL has been shown to be a method capable of producing pure nanoparticles directly from a wide variety of bulk materials and compounds. In this work a single-step PLAL process for production of luminescent GaAs-nano-particles and silica-coated gold nanoparticles was developed.