Photo-Induced Heating in Plasmonic Nanoparticles Trapped in Thermo-Sensitive Liquid Crystals

Thermo-sensitive liquid crystals may result, for some aspects, good host materials for plasmonic nanoparticles. In particular they are suitable to study and measure the temperature variations produced by photo-induced plasmonic joule effect in the metallic nanoparticles. Combining the properties of liquid crystals and metallic nanoparticles, allows to measure temperature variations in different ways by exploiting the optical properties of thermotropic liquid crystals: In a first attempt, by combining nematic liquid crystals and spherical metallic nanoparticles, we have predicted and measured temperature changes, under a suitable (resonant) optical illumination, by measuring the photo-thermal induced birefringence variation. In a different experiment, we have combined cholesteric liquid crystals and gold nanorods: Light-induced variations of structural colorations exhibited by cholesteric liquid crystals has been used as a new methodology to measure nanoscale heat variation with a very high sensitivity (0.03 K).