Saturable absorption and reverse saturable absorption on silver particles with different shapes

Micro/nanostructured silver particles with different shapes (flower, wire, and rod) have been prepared and characterized. All the open aperture z-scan curves of silver microrods and silver nanoflowers present a typical reverse saturable absorption. With the increase of incident intensity, the nonlinear absorption coefficients and the third-order optical susceptibilities ImX(3) of nanoflowers increase, but those of silver microrods decrease. Moreover, the silver nanowires show the conversion from saturable absorption to reverse saturable absorption. There was no definite correlation between incident intensity and nonlinear absorption coefficient (β) under the conditions studied herein. And nonlinear optical properties of micro/nanostructured silver particles are dependent on the particle shape in suspensions at 800 nm.