Optothermal response of plasmonic nanofocusing lens under picosecond laser irradiation

Abstract

This work studied the optothermal response of plasmonic nanofocusing structures under picosecond pulsed laser irradiation. The surface plasmon polariton is simulated to calculate the optical energy dissipation as the Joule heating source and the thermal transport process is studied using a two temperature model (TTM). At the picosecond time scale that we are interested in, the Fourier heat equation is used to study the electron thermal transport and the hyperbolic heat equation is used to study the lattice thermal transport. For comparison, the single temperature model (STM) is also studied. The difference between TTM and STM indicates that TTM provides more accurate estimates in the picosecond time scale and the STM results are only reliable when the local electron and lattice temperature difference is negligible.