Near- and off-resonant optical limiting properties of goldsilver alloy nanoparticles for intense nanosecond laser pulses

摘要

The near- and off-resonant optical limiting properties of gold, silver and goldsilver alloy nanoparticles in methyl 2-methylprop-2-enoate for nanosecond laser pulses are presented. The nanoparticles are generated by picosecond pulsed laser ablation in liquid having hydrodynamic diameters from 26 to 30nm. We use a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser working at a wavelength of 1064 or 532nm, with a pulse width of 3ns to characterize their behaviour by laser energy and fluence dependent transmittance measurements. To elucidate the contribution of nonlinear scattering to the optical limiting properties the scattered light energy at an angle of 90°is measured. The experimental results show that these nanoparticles have a strong nonlinear attenuation which can be attributed to intraband, interband and free carrier absorption and a thermal-induced scattering only at high input energies. Our results indicate in addition that the surface plasmon resonance does not contribute to the nonlinear processes at high input energies.