The temperature distribution throughout arrays of illuminated metal nanoparticles is investigated numerically and experimentally. The two cases of continuous and femtosecond-pulsed illumination are addressed. In the case of continuous illumination, two distinct regimes are evidenced: a temperature confinement regime, where the temperature increase remains confined at the vicinity of each nanosource of heat, and a temperature delocalization regime, where the temperature is uniform throughout the whole nanoparticle assembly despite the heat sources' nanometric size. We show that the occurrence of one regime or another simply depends on the geometry of the nanoparticle distribution. In particular, we derived (i) simple expressions of dimensionless parameters aimed at predicting the degree of temperature confinement and (ii) analytical expressions aimed at estimating the actual temperature increase at the center of an assembly of nanoparticles under illumination, preventing heavy numerical simulations. All these theoretical results are supported by experimental measurements of the temperature distribution on regular arrays of gold nanoparticles under illumination. In the case of femtosecond-pulsed illumination, we explain the two conditions that must be fulfilled to observe a further enhanced temperature spatial confinement.

Under illumination, metal nanoparticles can turn into ideal nanosources of heat due to enhanced light absorption at the plasmonic resonance wavelength. In this article, we aim at providing a comprehensive description of the generation of microbubbles in a liquid occurring around plasmonic nanoparticles under continuous illumination. We focus on a common situation where the nanoparticles are located on a solid substrate and immersed in water. Experimentally, we evidenced a series of singular phenomena: (i) the bubble lifetime after heating can reach several minutes, (ii) the bubbles are not made of water steam but of air, and (iii) the local temperature required to trigger bubble generation is much larger than 100 degrees C: This last observation evidences that superheated liquid water, up to 220 degrees C, is easy to achieve in plasmonics, under ambient pressure conditions and even over arbitrary large areas. This could lead to new chemical synthesis approaches in solvothermal chemistry