Plasmonic Nanoscale Temperature Shaping on a Single Titanium Nitride Nanostructure

24 June 2022, Version 2
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Arbitrary shaping of temperature fields at the nanometer scale is an important goal in nanotechnology; this is challenging due to diffusive nature of heat transfer. In the present work, we have numerically demonstrated that spatial shaping of nanoscale temperature fields can be achieved by plasmonic heating of a single titanium nitride (TiN) nanostructure. A key feature of TiN is its low thermal conductivity (k_TiN = 29 [W m−1K−1]) compared with ordinary plasmonic metals such as Au (k_Au = 314 [W m−1K−1]). When localized surface plasmon resonance of a metal nanostructure is excited, light intensity will be converted to heat power density in the nanostructure via the Joule heating effect. For a gold nanoparticle, nonuniform spatial distributions of the heat power density will be disappeared due to the high thermal conductivity of Au; the nanoparticle surface will be entirely isothermal. In contrast, the spatial distributions of the heat power density can be clearly transcribed into temperature fields on a TiN nanostructure because heat dissipation is suppressed. In fact, we have revealed that highly localized temperature distributions can be selectively controlled around the TiN nanostructure in the several tens of nm spatial resolution depending on excitation wavelength. The present results indicate that the arbitrary temperature shaping at the nanometer scale can be achieved by designing the heat power density in TiN nanostructures in plasmonic heating, leading to unconventional thermofluidics and thermal chemical biology.

Keywords

Thermoplasmonics
Refractory plasmonics
Titanium nitride
Plasmonic heating
Nanoscale temperature shaping
Heat power density

Supplementary materials

Title
Description
Actions
Title
Electronic Supplementary Information
Description
Supplementary numerical results
Actions

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.