Metal Nanoparticles as nanosources of heat

Metal nanoparticles, can turn into very efficient nanosources of heat when illuminated at their plasmonic resonance. This simple effect opens new opportunities to control heat generation on the nanometer scale with key applications for instance to cancer therapy, material sciences and imaging. In this study, ICREA Professor at ICFO Romain Quidant, in collaboration with researchers from the Fresnel Institute investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, collective effects in periodic arrays of gold nanoparticles. Depending on the interparticle distance they identify two different regimes; one for which the temperature remains confined at the vicinity of each nanoparticle and the other one where the temperature is uniform throughout the whole nanoparticle assembly.