Abstract
Gold nanoparticles with the diameter of 80 nm were individually set on a glass substrate and ablated in solution, resulting in fixation of their fragments onto the substrate. The experiment enabled us to observe morphological changes of the deposited particles with an atomic force microscope. A series of experiments made clear the followings: the ablation threshold ∼ 120 mJ/cm2, fragmentation initially took place at the surface, the fragments from single particles were deposited in the region of 200–300 nm, and the size of deposited fragments decreased with increasing the shot number.