Efficient Asymmetric photothermal source: Designing a heating Janus-Nanojet

TL;DR

This paper introduces innovative Janus nanoparticles with enhanced and directional photothermal heating capabilities, aiming to improve thermal control and efficiency in cancer hyperthermia treatments.

Contribution

It presents novel Janus nanoparticle designs with superior photothermal conversion and directional heating, addressing limitations of homogeneous nanoheaters in biomedical applications.

Findings

Doughnut-based Janus nanoparticles show outstanding photothermal control.

Janus nanoparticles can channel up to 91% of thermal energy to a target.

Enhanced thermal management improves hyperthermia therapy potential.

Abstract

Janus particles have flourished as subject of intensive research due to their synergetic properties and their promising use in different fields, especially in biomedicine. The combination of materials with radically different physical properties in the same nanostructure gives rise to the so-called Janus effects, allowing phenomena of a contrasting nature to occur in the same architecture. In particular, interesting advantages can be taken from a thermal Janus effect for photoinduced hyperthermia cancer therapies. Such therapies still have limitations associated to the heating control in terms of temperature stability and energy management. While previous studies have shown that some plasmonic single-material nanoparticles are somehow effective at killing cancer cells, it is necessary to investigate alternative plasmonic Janus nanoheaters to improve the heating efficiency and thermal control, mainly because the widespread single-material nanoheaters are highly homogeneous sources of heat, which implies that the surrounding biological medium is isotropically heated, equally affecting cancerous and healthy cells. A detailed thermoplasmonic study of the thermal Janus effect is still missing. Here we perform such study and demonstrate that doughnut-based Janus nanoparticles exhibit an outstanding photothermal control under practical illumination conditions, i.e., unpolarized light. Furthermore, we present novel and effective Janus nanoparticle designs that possess superior photothermal conversion features and unique directional heating capacity, being able to channel up to 91% of the total thermal energy onto a target. We discuss the implications of these innovative nanoparticles with regards to thermoplasmonics hyperthermia cancer therapy.