Conduction Band Electron Density Variation Leads to Different Degrees of Ultrafast Laser Ablation of Aluminum-Silver Bimetals in Double Distilled Water

Aluminum (Al) plasmonics is an exciting field of material science that emphasizes the specialty of the Al nanoparticles (NPs)/nanostructures (NSs) over the other all known plasmonic metal (silver, gold, and copper) NPs/NSs. In this report, we discussed our investigation of the synthesis of aluminum-silver (Al-Ag) alloy NPs by employing the well-known top-down technique i.e. laser ablation of metal targets submerged in the liquid media. In the present work, Al-Ag bimetallic NPs were synthesized in double distilled water (DDW). Thus produced Al-Ag NPs were confirmed by performing the characterization studies such as X-ray diffractometry (XRD), UV–visible absorption, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The synthesized Al-Ag bimetallic NPs in colloidal form were preserved in an air-tightened vessels to avoid the secondary growth of the NPs which may leads to the aggregation. The average sizes estimated were ~17.5 nm, ~10 nm, and ~7.7 nm, for the ablation of the Al-Ag bi-metal targets 1Ag–0.5Al, 0.5Ag–0.5Al, and 0.5Ag–1Al in DDW. The size variation could be attributed to the degree of ablation, that results from the variation of the density of conduction band electrons in the Al-Ag bi-metal targets with different metallic concentrations.