Speaker
Description
With their high melting threshold, thermal stability, and biocompatibility, silicon nanostructures serve as powerful nanoheaters, capable of boiling water and generating microbubbles under continuous-wave laser illumination. Moreover, their inherent Raman-active phonons grant a second superpower: precise Stokes thermometry, mapping temperature through shifts in phonon frequency. Combined, these abilities make silicon nanostructures both the source and the probe, simultaneously driving and revealing microboiling with high precision. Here, we use a tightly focused 488 nm laser beam, with a waist diameter of 6 µm for both optical heating and Raman thermometry to study and compare boiling around silicon nanodisks (800 nm diameter, 100 nm height) and silicon films (100 nm thickness).
