Abstract
When a laser beam writes on a metallic film, it usually coarsens and deuniformizes grains because of Ostwald ripening, similar to the case of annealing. Here we show an anomalous refinement effect of metal grains: A metallic silver film with large grains melts and breaks into uniform, close-packed, and ultrafine (∼ 10 nm) grains by laser direct writing with a nanoscale laser spot size and nanosecond pulse that causes localized heating and adaptive shock-cooling. This method exhibits high controllability in both grain size and uniformity, which lies in a linear relationship between the film thickness (h) and grain size (D), D ∝ h. The linear relationship is significantly different from the classical spinodal dewetting theory obeying a nonlinear relationship (D ∝ h5/3) in common laser heating. We also demonstrate the application of such a silver film with a grain size of ∼ 10.9 nm as a surface-enhanced Raman scattering chip, exhibiting superhigh spatial-uniformity and low detection limit down to 10−15 M. This anomalous refinement effect is general and can be extended to many other metallic films.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51971070, T2225017, and 10974037), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFA0200403), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2021QF003), the CAS Strategy Pilot Program (No. XDA 09020300), and the Eu-FP7 Project (No. 247644).
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Wang, L., Wang, S., Wang, X. et al. Anomalous refinement and uniformization of grains in metallic thin films. Nano Res. 16, 13358–13365 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-5902-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-5902-9