Gold nanorod-facilitated localized heating of droplets in microfluidic chips

A gold nanorod-facilitated optical heating method for droplets in microfluidic chips is reported. Individual and stream nanoliter level droplets containing gold nanorods are heated by a low power 808-nm-wavelength laser. Owing to the high photothermal conversion efficiency of gold nanorods, a droplet temperature of 95 °C is achieved by employing a 13.6 mW laser with good reproducibility. The heating and cooling times are 200 and 800 ms, respectively, which are attributed to the fast thermal-transfer rates of the droplets. By controlling the irradiation laser power, the temperature cycles for polymerase chain reaction are also demonstrated.