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Super-Heating and Micro-Bubble Generation around Plasmonic Nanoparticles under cw Illumination

2014; American Chemical Society; Volume: 118; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/jp411519k

1932-7455

Guillaume Baffou, Julien Polleux, Hervé Rigneault, Serge Monneret,

Laser-Ablation Synthesis of Nanoparticles

Under illumination, metal nanoparticles can turn into ideal nanosources of heat due to enhanced light absorption at the plasmonic resonance wavelength. In this article, we aim at providing a comprehensive description of the generation of microbubbles in a liquid occurring around plasmonic nanoparticles under continuous illumination. We focus on a common situation where the nanoparticles are located on a solid substrate and immersed in water. Experimentally, we evidenced a series of singular phenomena: (i) the bubble lifetime after heating can reach several minutes, (ii) the bubbles are not made of water steam but of air, and (iii) the local temperature required to trigger bubble generation is much larger than 100 °C: This last observation evidences that superheated liquid water, up to 220 °C, is easy to achieve in plasmonics, under ambient pressure conditions and even over arbitrary large areas. This could lead to new chemical synthesis approaches in solvothermal chemistry.