Thermal Confinement in Plasmonic Nanoparticles under Generalised Pulsed Illumination
Abstract
Thermal confinement is a key parameter in photothermal applications, as it determines the spatial extent of the region affected by the generated heat. In this work, we develop a numerical treatment to quantify thermal confinement in spherical plasmonic nanoparticles under excitation conditions ranging from ultrashort pulses to the continuous-wave regime. The model combines generalized optical heating with a finite-difference solution of the transient heat equation and explicitly accounts for finite interfacial thermal conductance. To characterize the spatial distribution of heat, we introduce a thermal confinement radius defined from the temporal temperature envelope in the surrounding medium. We demonstrate that pulse duration acts as a highly effective, tuneable parameter to govern thermal confinement. Notably, we quantitatively show that finite interfacial thermal conductance can induce deviations of up to 20% in the spatial confinement radius and over 60% in the transient thermal construct under ultrashort excitation. By comparing the characteristic dimensions of representative targeting ligands with the resulting thermal-confinement length scales, we show how pulse duration can be precisely tailored to control target heating. These results provide a unified framework for predicting nanoscale heat localization paving the way for the rational design of high precision thermoplasmonic applications.
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BibTeX
@misc{gonzalezcolsa2026thermal,
title = {{Thermal Confinement in Plasmonic Nanoparticles under Generalised Pulsed Illumination}},
author = {Javier González-Colsa and Dolores Ortiz and José María Saiz and Alfredo Franco and Francisco González and Fernando Bresme and Pablo Albella},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.21698},
eprint = {2610.21698},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21698},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Thermal Confinement in Plasmonic Nanoparticles under Generalised Pulsed Illumination
AU - Javier González-Colsa
AU - Dolores Ortiz
AU - José María Saiz
AU - Alfredo Franco
AU - Francisco González
AU - Fernando Bresme
AU - Pablo Albella
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.21698
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21698
AB - Thermal confinement is a key parameter in photothermal applications, as it determines the spatial extent of the region affected by the generated heat. In this work, we develop a numerical treatment to quantify thermal confinement in spherical plasmonic nanoparticles under excitation conditions ranging from ultrashort pulses to the continuous-wave regime. The model combines generalized optical heating with a finite-difference solution of the transient heat equation and explicitly accounts for finite interfacial thermal conductance. To characterize the spatial distribution of heat, we introduce a thermal confinement radius defined from the temporal temperature envelope in the surrounding medium. We demonstrate that pulse duration acts as a highly effective, tuneable parameter to govern thermal confinement. Notably, we quantitatively show that finite interfacial thermal conductance can induce deviations of up to 20% in the spatial confinement radius and over 60% in the transient thermal construct under ultrashort excitation. By comparing the characteristic dimensions of representative targeting ligands with the resulting thermal-confinement length scales, we show how pulse duration can be precisely tailored to control target heating. These results provide a unified framework for predicting nanoscale heat localization paving the way for the rational design of high precision thermoplasmonic applications.
ER -