Production of Cu/Zn Nanoparticles by Pulsed Laser Ablation in Liquids and Sintered Cu/Zn Alloy

Abstract

As a preliminary step to establish technology for fabricating High-Entropy Alloys (HEAs) that can make a large-scale HEA using a pulse laser with high peak intensity and high-repetition in the future, we fabricated alloys in which two types of metal atom are mixed close together in the order of nanometers. For the method to produce the alloy, metal alloy nanoparticles were prepared by irradiating the material in liquid with focused high-repetition Q-switched laser pulses using an in-liquid laser ablation method. When brass powder was used as an original material, analysis results by TEM showed that numerous nanoparticles mixed with copper and zinc atoms could be produced. Furthermore, it was clarified by SEM EDS that copper and zinc atoms in the nanoalloy were maintained at a ratio of 3:1 in sintered alloy, and that the atoms were spatially uniformly distributed over a wide range in sintered metal.