Silver nanoparticles/polydimethylsiloxane hybrid materials and their optical limiting property

To exploit the application potential of Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) in optical limiting materials, it is significant to develop AgNPs doped polymeric hybrid materials. In this paper, spherical AgNPs were prepared using the seeding growth method. An additional silica coating was employed to obtain the Ag@SiO2 core-shell materials. Then Ag@SiO2 was doped into polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS) rubbers to investigate their optical limiting property to laser at 532 nm. The results showed that the Ag@SiO2 doped PDMS rubber exhibited good optical limiting effect, which should be attributed to the nonlinear optical absorption and refraction. The AgNPs-PDMS hybrid materials would be very promising in optical limiting application area.