Thermo-optical properties of embedded silver nanoparticles

Thermo-optical properties of nanocomposite materials consisting of noble metal nanoparticles dispersed in a dielectric medium are appropriate for many applications as imaging, nonlinear optics, or optical monitoring of local thermal exchanges. Here, we analyze the thermo-optical response of silver nanoparticles. The contribution of inter- and intraband transitions to the thermo-optical index of bulk silver is first extracted using experimental results reported earlier in the literature. The influence of these two contributions on the thermo-optical properties of silver nanoparticles embedded in glass is then investigated. The results show that these properties are essentially due to the intraband thermo-optical contribution in the vicinity of the surface plasmon resonance of the nanoparticles, while they are dominated by the interband contribution close to the interband transition threshold. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4766409]