Abstract
Pd and Pt nanoparticles on Fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) are produced. This outcome is reached by processing nanoscale-thick Pd and Pt films deposited on the FTO surface by nanosecond laser pulse. Such laser processes are demonstrated to initiate a dewetting phenomenon in the deposited metal films and lead to the formation of the nanoparticles. In particular, the effect of the film’s thickness on the mean size of the nanoparticles, when fixed the laser fluence, is studied. Our results indicate that the substrate topography influences the dewetting process of the metal films and, as a consequence, impacts on the nanoparticle characteristics. The results concerning the Pd and Pt nanoparticles’ sizes versus starting films thickness and substrate topography are discussed. In particular, the presented discussion is based on the elucidation of the effect of the substrate topography effect on the dewetting process through the excess of chemical potential. Finally, Raman analysis on the fabricated samples are presented. They show, in particular for the case of the Pd nanoparticles on FTO, a pronounced Raman signal enhancement imputable to plasmonic effects.
Highlights
IntroductionPalladium (Pd) and Platinum (Pt) nanoparticles (NPs) are widely exploited to design and fabricate nanostructured innovative sensing, catalyst, electronic, energy production and storage devices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Palladium (Pd) and Platinum (Pt) nanoparticles (NPs) are widely exploited to design and fabricate nanostructured innovative sensing, catalyst, electronic, energy production and storage devices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8].From a general point of view, this type of nano- system captures great interest due to size-dependent structure and properties, high specific surface area and reactivity
Our results indicate that the substrate topography influences the dewetting process of the metal films and, as a consequence, impacts on the nanoparticle characteristics
Summary
Palladium (Pd) and Platinum (Pt) nanoparticles (NPs) are widely exploited to design and fabricate nanostructured innovative sensing, catalyst, electronic, energy production and storage devices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. In particular, the effect of the FTO surface topography on the resulting NPs size through the geometry-dependent chemical potential, an effect which is absent for the dewetting phenomenon of thin metal films on flat surfaces [22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]. This effect is discussed starting from previous results on metallic film dewetting occurring on intentionally patterned surfaces [33,34,35,36] We show that this effect is crucial in the present case since the used FTO substrate ( to standard FTO used in real devices) does not present a flat surface on a microscopic scale. From a general point of view, this work completes our previous studies on the molten phase dewetting of pure (Au) or alloy (AuPd) metals films on transparent conductive oxides [17,40,41], extending these studies to other metals such as Pd and Pt whose nanostructuration by laser pulsed-induced dewetting is rarely studied (Pt) [42,43] or, practically, absent (Pd)
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