mse

 While others have used "Pulsed laser ablation in liquid" to produce nanoparticles for ten years, researchers at Rensselaer found for the first time that this approach could lead to more interesting structures.  It was surprising to find hollow spheres and nanowires in the products fabricated by pulsed laser ablation of an aluminum target immersed in liquid. This technique has been used by other researchers for ten years in producing nanoparticles, but such structures were never observed before. Later platinum hollow spheres and permalloy Easter eggs-hollow spheres containing non-aggregated nanoparticles-were also fabricated by the approach. These observations are exciting because hollow structures have increasing applications in catalysis, photonics, drug delivery, hydrogen storage, etcSome of the experimental results have been published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 114, 3869 & 114, 11370 (2010); Nanotechnology, 21, 145609 (2010) and Applied Physics Letters 97, 124106 (2010).  Now Prof. Chrisey's group are trying more materials to see whether the phenomena are universal, and studying to reveal the mechanisms underlying the phenomena.