We consider a general problem of laser pulse heating of spherical metal particles with the sizes ranging from nanometers to millimeters. We employ the exact Mie solutions of the diffraction problem and solve heat-transfer equations to determine the m
aximum temperature at the particle surface as a function of optical and thermometric parameters of the problem. The main attention is paid to the case when the thermometric conductivity of the particle is much larger than that of the environment, as it is in the case of metal particles in fluids. We show that in this case at any given finite duration of the laser pulse the maximum temperature rise as a function of the particle size reaches an absolute maximum at a certain finite size of the particle, and we suggest simple approximate analytical expressions for this dependence which covers the entire range of variations of the problem parameters and agree well with direct numerical simulations.
A new type of resonant light absorption by a small particle (nanocluster) is reported. The problem cannot be described within the commonly used dipole scattering approximation and should be studied with methods based upon the exact Mie solution. It i
s shown that the absorption cross-section has giant maxima realized at small values of the imaginary part of the complex dielectric permittivity of the particle. The maxima are situated in the vicinity of the plasmon (polariton) resonances and correspond to the regions where the dissipative damping equals the radiative one. The case is similar to the recently introduced anomalous scattering [PRL vol. 97, 263902 (2006)] and exhibits similar peculiarities.
It is shown that elastic resonance scattering of light by a finite-size obstacle with weak dissipation is analogous to quantum scattering by a potential with quasi-discrete levels and exhibits Fano resonances. Localized plasmons (polaritons), exited
in the obstacle by the incident light, are equivalent to the quasi-discrete levels, while the radiative decay of these excitations plays exactly the same role as tunnelling from the quasi-discrete levels for the quantum problem. Mie scattering of light by a spherical particle and an exactly solvable discrete model with nonlocal coupling simulating wave scattering in systems with reduced spatial dimensionality are discussed as examples.
