Conventional materials engineering approaches for polycrystalline ceramic gain media rely on optically isotropic crystals with high equilibrium solubility of luminescent rare-earth (RE) ions. Crystallographic optical symmetry is traditionally relied upon to avoid scattering losses caused by refractive index mismatch at grain boundaries in randomly oriented anisotropic crystals and high-equilibrium RE-solubility is needed to produce sufficient photoluminescence (PL) for amplification and oscillation. These requirements exclude materials such as polycrystalline sapphire/alumina that have significantly superior thermo-mechanical properties (Rs~19,500Wm-1), because it possesses 1) uxiaxial optical properties that at large grain sizes, result in significant grain boundary scattering, and 2) a very low (~10-3%) RE equilibrium solubility that prohibits suitable PL. I present new materials engineering approaches operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium to produce a bulk Nd:Al2O3 medium with optical gain suitable for amplification/lasing. The key insight relies on tailoring the crystallite size to the other important length scales-wavelength of light and interatomic dopant distances and show that fine crystallite sizes result in sufficiently low optical losses and over-equilibrium levels of optically active RE-ions, the combination of which results in gain. The emission bandwidth is broad, ~13THz, a new record for Nd3+ transitions, enabling tuning from ~1050nm-1100nm and/or ultra-short pulses in a host with superior thermal-mechanical figure of merit. Laser grade Nd:Al2O3 opens a pathway for lasers with revolutionary performance.
Several in vitro and in vivo studies have been performed to investigate the potential of Photothermal Therapy (PTT) as a cancer treatment strategy. However, there are still open questions concerning the optimal parameters for generating cavitation bubbles and acoustic shockwaves for increasing the damage to malignant cells, and the primary mechanism for cell damage in PTT is still a matter of debate. This study investigates PTT based on shockwaves from cavitation induced far from the cells, due to laser absorption by gold nanorods (GNR) colloidal solutions in vitro. The effects of laser energy and distance from the cavitation on cell viability is investigated in PC3 prostate cancer cells, and Escherichia coli (E. coli) cells, respectively.
Laser-nanoparticles interactions have been widely used for several years. In biomedicine, several in vitro and in vivo experiments have shown promising results for the detection and treatment of cancer. One of the techniques of interest to us, is the nanoparticle-assisted photothermal therapy (PTT), which consists of irradiating cancer cells incubated with nanoparticles with either a pulsed or continuous (cw) laser in order to damage the cells.
However, there is still a debate over which type of laser is most effective for PTT for cancer treatment. On the one hand, cw lasers are minimally invasive and can be used for both detection and treatment of tumors. On the other hand, pulsed lasers offer great spatial precision and can deposit higher energy fluences than cw lasers, making them very efficient for inducing cavitation to damage cancer cells and tumors mechanically.
The aim of this study is to investigate whether simultaneous application of cw and pulsed laser could offer a synergetic enhancement of PTT efficacy to damage cancer cells in vitro, compared to either laser applied individually. PTT efficacy is evaluated through cell viability tests following the irradiation of prostate cancer (PC3) cells incubated with gold nanorods (5.7 X10 10 p/ml).
By irradiating the PC3-nanorod solution with the cw laser at 808 nm for ~60 seconds, the temperature increases from 37.5 to ~45°C, which damages some cancer cells via the heat shock response within the cells, and also could increase their sensitivity to the mechanical stress caused by the shock wave generated from inducing cavitation in the solution by the pulsed laser irradiation.
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