Effect of Water Pressure on Size of Nanoparticles in Liquid-Phase Laser Ablation

We investigated the effect of applying external pressure to ambient water on the size of nanoparticles synthesized by liquid-phase laser ablation. The in-situ diagnostics of the ablation space clearly indicated that the size of nanoparticles was a function of water pressure. On the other hand, we observed no temporal evolution of the size of nanoparticles beyond 0.2 mu s after the irradiation of the laser pulse for ablation. These results suggest the importance of parameters in the laser-ablation plasma in the control of the size of nanoparticles. (C) 2011 The Japan Society of Applied Physics