Leonid V. Zhigilei, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, has earned the Fojtik-Henglein Prize for advancing our understanding of nanoparticulate materials that are vital to energy and environmental sustainability, semiconductors and electronics, biomedicine and advanced automotives.The Fojtik-Henglein Prize honors Anton Fojtik and Armin Henglein, who together invented an outstanding technique to fabricate functional nanostructures and prepare chemically clean and environmentally friendly nanoparticles. Their process, known today as pulsed laser ablation in liquids, involves focusing a pulsed laser beam on a piece of solid material placed into a liquid environment and ablating or vaporizing the target material.
The computational research in Zhigilei's group has provided insights into a complex sequence of processes triggered by the laser energy deposition and involving the formation of a cavitation bubble, development of hydrodynamic instabilities at the interface between the hot ablation plume and liquid environment, as well as the rapid quenching and solidification of nanoparticles coming into contact with cold liquid. The improved understanding of the mechanisms of nanoparticle generation by laser ablation in liquids is guiding the advancement of this technique for the mass production of colloidal alloy nanoparticles with well-controlled size distribution, composition, and defect structures.
Zhigilei accepted the biannual Fojtik-Henglein Prize at the 6th annual conference on Advanced Nanoparticle Generation and Excitation by Lasers in Liquids. This honor more specifically recognizes a series of Zhigilei's recent papers on this topic, including a recent paper on The Effect of Pulse Duration on Nanoparticle Generation in Pulsed Laser Ablation in Liquids: Insights from Large-scale Atomistic Simulations, published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
Experimental verification and validation of the computational predictions is an integral part of the research projects in Zhigilei's group, conducted in collaboration with leading research groups worldwide. In the project on laser ablation in liquids, Zhigilei and his students collaborate with research groups of Professor Stephan Barcikowski at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; Professor Bilal Gökce from the University of Wuppertal, Germany; Professor Wolfgang Kautek from the University of Vienna, Austria; and Dr. Iaroslav Gnilitskyi from NoviNano Lab LLC, Ukraine. The results of these collaborations are reported in a number of joint research papers, including a recent paper on the Limited Elemental Mixing in Nanoparticles Generated by Ultrashort Pulse Laser Ablation of AgCu Bilayer Thin Films in a Liquid Environment: Atomistic Modeling and Experiments, published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.