Interfacial nanobubbles produced by long-time preserved cold water

Interfacial gaseous nanobubbles which have remarkable properties such as unexpectedly long lifetime and significant potential applications, are drawing more and more attention. However, the recent dispute about the contamination or gas inside the nanobubbles causes a large confusion due to the lack of simple and clean method to produce gas nanobubbles. Here we report a convenient and clean method to effectively produce interfacial nanobubbles based on a pure water system. By adding the cold water cooled at 4 ℃ for more than 48 h onto highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surface, we find that the average density and total volume of nanobubbles are increased to a high level and mainly dominated by the concentrations of the dissolved gases in cold water. Our findings and methods are crucial and helpful for settling the newly arisen debates on gas nanobubbles.