Medium effect on the electron cooling dynamics in gold nanorods and truncated tetrahedra

A study on the electron relaxation dynamics and thermal cooling of colloidal gold nanoparticles (see Figure) in air and water finds that the local energy exchange with the surrounding medium occurs on the picosecond time scale, comparable with the electron-phonon relaxation, while a slow heat dissipation by water ensures that the particles remain heated for hundreds of picoseconds.