A Novel Top-Down Approach to Produce CU2O Nanoparticles Using Nanosecond and Picosecond Lasers.

We report a novel top-down procedure to obtain CU₂O nanoparticles in two steps. In the first step a chemical method is used to synthesis CU₂O particles of ~500 nm in size. In the second step, these particles are fragmented into ~70 and ~10 nm sized Cu₂O particles by using nanosecond (532 nm, 7 ns and 10 Hz) and picosecond (532 nm, 30 ps and 10 Hz) pulses, respectively. A comparative study based on laser pulse duration has shown the superiority of picosecond pulses over nanosecond pulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]