Laser ablation of a solid target in liquid medium for beryllium nanoparticles synthesis

In this paper, we describe a method to synthesize beryllium (Be) nanoparticles (NPs) by laser ablation of a solid target immersed in a liquid medium. Beryllium dust was successfully synthesized following the irradiation of a Be bulk target, which was immersed in water, acetone or heavy water, respectively, using the first and second harmonic (1064 and 532 nm) of a Nd: YAG laser source providing ns pulses, with a repetition rate of 10 Hz. The laser fluences used for Be target ablation were 8 and 15 J/cm2. In order to argue the successful obtaining of Be dust, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used for surface analysis. Colloidal solutions analysis by dynamic light scattering (DLS) supports the SEM analysis in terms of NPs size, whereas chemical analysis by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was used in order to investigate the chemical composition. Moreover, thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS) was performed on Be dust synthesized in heavy water to study the retention of deuterium (D). The key parameters for obtaining much sharper and regular size distribution were identified as being the liquid medium, laser fluence, and wavelength.