Abstract
Taking advantage of the channel confinement of mesoporous films to prevent the agglomeration of Ag nanoparticles to achieve large third-order optical nonlinearity in amorphous materials, Ag-loaded composite mesoporous silica film was prepared by the electrochemical deposition method on ITO substrate. Ag ions were firstly transported into the channels of mesoporous film by the diffusion and binding force of channels, which were reduced to nanoparticles by applying suitable voltage. The existence and uniform distribution of Ag nanoparticles ranging in 1–10 nm in the mesoporous silica thin films were exhibited by UV spectrophotometer, X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements. The third-order optical nonlinearity induced by Ag nanoparticles was studied by the Z-scan technique. Due to the local field surface plasmon resonance, the maximum third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility of Ag-loaded composite mesoporous silica film is 1.53×10−10 esu, which is 1000 times larger than that of the Ag-contained chalcogenide glasses which showed large nonlinearity in amorphous materials.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Prof. Yuzong Gu and Yawan Cao from Henan University for their Z-scan measurements.
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This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSF) (grant number 51272183) and the Nanotechnology Program of Suzhou (grant number ZXG201438).
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Tan, M., Liu, Q. Large third-order optical nonlinearity in vertically oriented mesoporous silica thin films embedded with Ag nanoparticles. J Nanopart Res 18, 362 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-016-3674-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-016-3674-9