Gold nanoparticle transfer through photothermal effects in a metamaterial absorber by nanosecond laser

A non-complicated, controllable method of metallic nanoparticle fabrication at low operating light power is proposed. The method is based on laser-induced forward transfer, using a metamaterial absorber as the donor to significantly enhance the photothermal effect and reduce the operating light fluence to 35 mJ/cm(2), which is much lower than that in previous works. A large number of metallic nanoparticles can be transferred by one shot of focused nanosecond laser pulses. Transferred nanoparticles exhibit good size uniformity and the sizes are controllable. The optical properties of transferred particles are characterized by dark-field spectroscopy and the experimental results agree with the simulation results.