Gold nanostructures, supporting localized surface plasmon resonances, can be designed to act upon illumination as efficient point-like sources of either light or heat, opening plenty of new science and applications ranging from quantum optics to medicine. In this talk we discuss how their optical and photothermal properties can be both exploited to develop new nanotools for biosciences, including minimally invasive strategies for the detection and therapy of cancer.

The first part of the lecture focuses on the use of the intense and confined optical fields bound to gold nanostructures for biosensing and optical trapping. In the frame of sensing, we show that gold nanostructures lithographically prepared on glass can be engineered to become compact and highly sensitive sensors to detect low concentrations of cancer markers in human serum. As for optical trapping, we demonstrate that plasmonic fields enable creating on-a-chip nano-optical tweezers able to trap nano- specimens with a low intensity laser beam. Both techniques, biosensing and trapping, can be integrated into a microfluidic environment to form an analytical platform that could become a precursor of future point-of-care devices for early cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring.

In the second part I’ll tell about the use of gold nanoparticles as remotely controlled point-like sources of heat for photothermal cancer therapy. We first discuss, both theoretically and experimentally, the physics of heat generation at the nanoscale along with the effect of the particle shape and the illumination. We then present the use of conjugated gold nanoparticles for specific cancer cell destruction.


Tuesday, July 14, 2015, 12:00. Blue Lecture Room