Effect of Organic Stabilizers on Silver Nanoparticles Fabricated by Femtosecond Pulsed Laser Ablation

Laser ablation has several advantages over the chemical synthesis of nanoparticles due to its simplicity and because it is a faster and cleaner process. In this paper, we use femtosecond laser ablation to generate highly concentrated silver colloidal nanoparticle solutions. Those high concentrations usually lead to agglomeration of the nanoparticles, rendering the solution nearly useless. We employ two different organic stabilizers (hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide, CTAB, and polyvinylpyrrolidone, PVP) to avoid this problem and study their effect on the nanoparticle size distribution, structural characteristics, and the solution concentration.