Extremely rapid isotropic irradiation of nanoparticles with ions generated in situ by a nuclear reaction.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30367036.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-06789-8 and PMC identifier 6203839.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Energetic ions represent an important tool for the creation of controlled structural defects in solid nanomaterials. However, the current preparative irradiation techniques in accelerators show significant limitations in scaling-up, because only very thin layers of nanoparticles can be efficiently and homogeneously irradiated. Here, we show an easily scalable method for rapid irradiation of nanomaterials by light ions formed homogeneously in situ by a nuclear reaction. The target nanoparticles are embedded in B<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> and placed in a neutron flux. Neutrons captured by <sup>10</sup>B generate an isotropic flux of energetic α particles and <sup>7</sup>Li<sup>+</sup> ions that uniformly irradiates the surrounding nanoparticles. We produced 70 g of fluorescent nanodiamonds in an approximately 30-minute irradiation session, as well as fluorescent silicon carbide nanoparticles. Our method thus increased current preparative yields by a factor of 10<sup>2</sup>-10<sup>3</sup>. We envision that our technique will increase the production of ion-irradiated nanoparticles, facilitating their use in various applications.