Tailoring Drug Mobility by Photothermal Heating of Graphene Plasmons

Abstract

A theoretical approach to quantitatively determine the photothermally driven enhancement of molecular mobility of graphene-indomethacin mixtures under infrared laser irradiation is proposed. Graphene plasmons absorb incident electromagnetic energy and dissipate them into heat. The absorbed energy depends on optical properties of graphene plasmons, which are sensitive to structural parameters, and concentration of plasmonic nanostructures. By using theoretical modelling, temperature gradients of the bulk drug with different concentrations of graphene plasmons are calculated. From these, the temperature dependence of structural molecular relaxation and diffusion of indomethacin are determined and how the heating process significantly enhances the drug mobility is found out.