Understanding the Spatiotemporal Resolution of Near-Field Photoacoustics from Nanostructures

When gold nanorods are molecularly targeted to cells, they can act as nanoscale transducers that amplify the acoustic signals triggered by light, known as the photoacoustic effect. However, the majority of the existing studies focus on the far field photoacoustic signals that can be measured with an ultrasound transducer, much less is known in the near field regime where the photoacoustic signal strongly interacts with the cells and cell membrane molecules. Here we discuss the theory and numerical studies of near field photoacoustic distribution generated by a single gold nanorod upon pulsed laser illumination. Our results show that the near field region is much smaller than the wavelength of the associated acoustic pulse, and has a distinct spatial distribution controlled by the geometry of the nanorod. Specifically, the near field photoacoustic distribution of the nanorod is anisotropic and converges to an isotropic spherical wave at 100 nm away from the nanorod surface. Immediately around the nanorod, the near field photoacoustic signals decay dramatically, depending on the orientation. The nanorod shows about 75 percent stronger photoacoustic signal amplitude in the transverse direction than in the longitudinal direction. We show that the spatial confinement of the photoacoustic signal is also related to the laser pulse width and identify an optimal pulse width in the range of 0.01 ns to 10.44 ns depending on the nanorod dimension.Comment: The main text contains 22 pages and 8 figures, supplementary information contains 5 pages and 3 figure