Modifying the second order dispersion of femtosecond laser pulses to crack silver nanoparticles and control their dimensions

Abstract The potential application of metallic nanoparticles had been attracting attention and interest from different areas of academia and industry. The nanoparticles properties and applications depend heavily on their dimension and shape, thus special interest is aimed to controlling the nanoparticles sizes. Ultrashort laser pulses are known to change metallic nanoparticles characteristics, but the interaction mechanism is still not completely understood. In this work we reduced the dimension of silver nanoparticles with ultrashort pulses and demonstrated that there is a dependence of the particles size on the second order dispersion introduced in the pulses, which became smaller as the dispersion becomes more negative. Based on the results, we propose that the Coulomb explosion that reduces the nanoparticles size is predominantly initiated by multiphotonic ionization for the intensities used (10 14  W/cm 2 ).