Tailoring of Plasmonic Functionalized Metastructures to Enhance Local Heating Release

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how plasmonic nanoheaters with specific gold nanodisk arrangements and layered doped polymers can achieve significant and controllable local heating, useful for nano medicine and chemistry applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design of plasmonic nanoheaters with enhanced and tunable thermal responses through structural and excitation modulation.

Findings

Temperature increase of over 250°C with layered structures

Fine thermal control with a 60°C variation using laser modulation

Effective application potential in nano medicine and chemistry

Abstract

Plasmonic nanoheaters are reported that produce a significant local heating when excited by a 532 nm wavelength focussed laser beam. A significant temperature increase derives from the strong confinement of electric field enabled by the specific arrangement of Au nanodisks constituting the nanoheater. The thermal response is much more sensitive when layering the gold nanoheaters by a thick layer of doped polymer, reaching a temperature variation of more than 250{\deg}C. The modulation of the excitation by a chopper enables the fine control of the thermal response with a measured maximum temperature variation of about 60{\deg}C in a single period. These intriguing features can be efficiently exploited for the design of novel systems finding application in nano medicine and nano chemistry