Ablation of Biological Tissues by Plasmonic Nanoparticles

Abstract

In this chapter, we perform modeling of soft and hard biological tissue ablation by plasmonic nanoparticles heated by short and ultrashort laser pulses. A goal of plasmonic laser nanosurgery/nanoablation is to deliver extremely precise heat blasts in programmed patterns to cancer cells, abnormal cell organelles, or mutated DNA molecules in order to destroy them. Short and ultrashort laser pulses hold key interest in precise nanoablation as they can allow for deposition of thermal energy to the target area by many orders of magnitude faster than the heat diffusion process that leaks heat to adjacent healthy cells. For these reasons, time-dependent thermal ablation simulations are performed in this chapter for short and ultrashort single pulse laser–nanoparticle–tissue interactions, as well as simulation for multipulse plasmonic nanoparticle ablation that utilizes the repetition of ultrashort pulses. This chapter contains material adapted from our publications [1, 2]. The detailed list of references and reviews on a given topic of this chapter can be found in those original papers.