Nanorods Produce More Heat Than Light

by Philip Ball Nature Materials Update, 23 Jun 2005 By absorbing visible light, rod-shaped gold nanoparticles can raise their local temperature by many tens of degrees. Chris Wang and colleagues at National Chung Cheng University in Chia-Yi, Taiwan, have found that the effect is much stronger for nanorods than for the nanospheres investigated previously. They say that the effect could be exploited for detection of biomolecules and for other sensors, and in contrast agents for optoacoustic biomedical imaging. Read more