Femtosecond laser surface engineering of biopolymer ceramic scaffolds coated with ZnO by low temperature atomic layer deposition method

Surface femtosecond laser texturing of biopolymer and biopolymer/ceramic composites with subsequent ZnO film deposition on the samples by low temperature Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) method was performed. In the current study, the deposition of ZnO layers was implemented at temperature 50 °C under pressure of 2 mbar. In order to investigate the effect of diverse ZnO thin films thickness, 100 or 500 repeating ALD cycles were applied. The samples were exposed to ultra-short laser pulses of 130 fs duration generated by a CPA (chirped pulse amplifier) Ti:Sapphire laser system. The artificial scaffolds were irradiated by varying the laser fluence (0.2 J/cm2, 0.41 J/cm2 and 2.07 J/cm2) and the number of applied laser pulses (N = 1, 2, 5 and 10). The morphology and chemical properties of the treated samples were evaluated by Scanning Electronic Microscopy, Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. By combining fs laser modification with low temperature ALD method, essentially improved bioactivity properties of hybrid organic–inorganic bone tissue scaffolds could be achieved, which is of great importance for future tissue engineering application of the samples.