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Updated: Jun 18, 2026

Multifunctional Hybrid Fe2O3-Au Nanoparticles for Efficient Plasmonic Heating
Published on: February 20, 2016
Melting, Bubblelike Expansion, and Explosion of Superheated Plasmonic Nanoparticles
Simon Dold1,2, Thomas Reichenbach3, Alessandro Colombo4
1University of Freiburg, Institute of Physics, Hermann-Herder-Straße 3, 79104 Freiburg, Germany.
Abstract:
We report on time-resolved coherent diffraction imaging of gas-phase silver nanoparticles, strongly heated via their plasmon resonance. The x-ray diffraction images reveal a broad range of phenomena for different excitation strengths, from simple melting over strong cavitation to explosive disintegration. Molecular dynamics simulations fully reproduce this behavior and show that the heating induces rather similar trajectories through the phase diagram in all cases, with the very different outcomes resulting solely from whether and where the stability limit of the metastable superheated liquid is crossed.
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