Optical nanoheating of resonant silicon nanoparticles

The photothermal characteristics of nanoparticles are of particular interest to biophotonic and biomedical applications due to their ability to efficiently localize thermal energy down to the nanometer scale. However, few works had demonstrated an efficient dissipation of heat to their nanoscale surrounding in response to optical excitation. Here, we demonstrate an efficient platform for optical nanoheating based on silicon nanocuboids. Based on Green's tensor formalism and temperature-dependent Raman spectroscopy analyses, we found that the significant nanoheating effect is a consequence of the resonant modes specifically, to the high degree of overlap between the different resonant modes of the silicon nanocuboids. Currently, the temperature rise of up to 300 K was measured with incident power density of 2.9 mW/µm². Such effective nanoheating platform would be suitable in applications where controllable optical nanoheating is crucial, such as nanosurgery, photochemistry, and nanofabrication.