Highly dispersed Au nanoparticles incorporated mesoporous TiO2 thin films with ultrahigh Au content

Abstract

Highly dispersed gold nanoparticles (NPs) incorporated mesoporous titania thin films with ultrahigh Au content (53.3 wt%) were synthesized by a deposition-precipitation method using urea as precipitator, which showed high off-resonant third-order optical nonlinear susceptibility (χ(3) = 2.69 × 10−8 esu) measured by the Z-scan technique at 1064 nm. The enhanced χ(3) value of the materials was attributed to the homogeneous dispersion and the ultrahigh concentration of the gold NPs, and the high linear refractive index of the titania matrix.