Dynamics, heat and mass transfer of a plasmonic bubble on a solid surface

Abstract

A recent paper [Wang et al., Giant and explosive plasmonic bubbles by delayed nucleation, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 115, 7676, 2018] reported on the behavior of a micro-bubble generated in water by the plasmonic resonance of gold nanoparticles covering a fused silica substrate. The use of a very-high-speed camera permitted the authors to record several features of the phenomenon: After an induction time, a large bubble impulsively grew, collapsed and then executed nearly periodic oscillations around a very slowly growing mean radius. In this paper we make use of a suitably adapted spherical bubble model to account for these observations. The model considers a spherical bubble and accounts for phase change, heat transfer and gas diffusion both in the bubble and in the liquid. After calibration with some of the reported experimental results, the modified spherical model is able to reproduce many other experimental observations. These results build confidence in the model and enable us to use it to describe several aspects of the phenomenon that are not accessible to experiment: temperature and dissolved gas concentration fields, time dependence and spatial distribution of the vapor and gas content of the bubble and others.