A collaborative research group consisting of Kenji Setoura (University of Hyogo) and Kohei Imura (Waseda University) in Publicly offered research C, Tomoya Oshikiri (Tohoku University) in Planned research B02, and Mamoru Tamura (Kwansei Gakuin University) in Publicly offered research C demonstrated that completely different temperature patterns appear on the surface of S-shaped titanium nitride nanostructures when irradiated with right- or left-handed circularly polarized light. This result leads to a new concept of a “nano temperature switch” that allows flexible control of heat using light, and is expected to find applications in chemical reaction control and microfluidic control.
This research was published online in Nano Letters on December 22, 2025.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05212