New ideally absorbing Au plasmonic nanostructures for biomedical applications

•Au nanostructures with the ideal absorption was proposed for biomedical purposes.•The ideal absorption search method was modified by considering quantum size effects.•Quantum size effects are crucial for determining ideal absorption of Au nanoshells.•Utilizing of alternative plasmonic materials in photothermal therapy is promising.

In this paper a new set of plasmonic nanostructures operating at the conditions of an ideal absorption (Grigoriev et al., 2015 [1]) was proposed for novel biomedical applications. We consider spherical x/Au nanoshells and Au/x/Au nanomatryoshkas, where 'x' changes from conventional Si and SiO2 to alternative plasmonic materials (Naik and Shalaev, 2013 [2]), such as zinc oxide doped with aluminum, gallium and indium tin oxide. The absorption peak of proposed nanostructures lies within 700-1100 nm wavelength region and corresponds to the maximal optical transparency of hemoglobin and melanin as well as to the radiation frequency of available pulsed medical lasers. It was shown that the ideal absorption takes place in a given wavelength region for Au coatings with thickness less than 12 nm. In this case finite quantum size effects for metallic nanoshells play a significant role. The mathematical model for the search of the ideal absorption conditions was modified by taking into account the finite quantum size effects.