Condensation of laser produced gold plasma during expansion and cooling in water environment

Abstract: The ecologically best way to produce nanoparticles (NP) is based on laser ablation in liquid (LAL). In the considered here case the LAL means that a gold target is irradiated through transparent water. During and after irradiation the heated material from surface of a target forms a plume which expands into liquid. In this paper we study a reach set of physical processes mixed with complicated hydrodynamic phenomena which all accompany LAL. These theoretical and simulation investigations are very important for practical applications. Laser pulses with different durations $\tau_L$ covering 5-th orders of magnitudes range from 0.1 ps to 0.5 ns and large absorbed fluences $F_{abs}$ near optical breakdown of liquid are compared. It is shown that the trajectory of the contact boundary with liquid at the middle and late stages after passing of the instant of maximum intensity of the longest pulse are rather similar for very different pulse durations (of course at comparable energies $F_{abs});$ we consider the pulses with a Gaussian temporal shape $I\propto \exp(-t^2/\tau_L^2).$ We follow how hot (few eV range) dense gold plasma expands, cools down, intersects a saturation curve, and condenses into NPs. These NPs appear first inside the water-gold diffusively mixed intermediate layer where gold vapor has the lowest temperature. Later in time pressure around the gold-water contact drops down below critical pressure for water. Thus NPs find themselves in gaseous water bubble where density of water gradually decreases to $10^{-4}-10^{-5}$ g/cm$!^3$ at the instant of maximum expansion of a bubble.