Effect of pulse duration on plasmonic enhanced ultrafast laser-induced bubble generation in water

Bubbles generated in water by focusing femtosecond and picosecond laser pulses in the presence of 100 nm gold nanoparticles have been investigated in the fluence range usually used for efficient cell transfection (100-200 mJ/cm(2)). Since resulting bubbles are at the nanoscale, direct observation using optical microscopy is not possible. An optical in-situ method has been developed to monitor the time-resolved variation in the extinction cross-section of an irradiated nanoparticle solution sample. This method is used to measure the bubbles lifetime and deduce their average diameter. We show that bubbles generated with femtosecond pulses (40-500 fs) last two times longer and are larger in average than those generated with picosecond pulses (0.5-5 ps). Controlling those bubble properties is necessary for optimizing off-resonance plasmonic enhanced ultrafast laser cell transfection.