Nanobubble nucleation by pulsed laser illumination of colloidal gold nanoparticles

This study expands upon a technique our team previously developed for generating nanobubbles on demand with a collimated pulsed laser beam. This work highlights how the controlled addition of gold nanoparticles enhances nanobubble generation efficiency in water, even at laser intensities well below the threshold for multiphoton ionization. Specifically, we investigated the influence of nanoparticles of three distinct sizes on the laser fluence threshold for bubble nucleation and the lifetime of the resultant nanobubbles. Our findings confirm that nanoparticles with a diameter of 60 nm exhibit the greatest nucleation efficiency, achieving nearly 45 % at a fluence threshold of around \(70\,(\pm \,11)\,\hbox {mJ/cm}^2\) . Interestingly, nanoparticle size did not impact the nanobubble lifetime.