Highly Efficient Copper Sulfide-Based Near-Infrared Photothermal Agents: Exploring the Limits of Macroscopic Heat Conversion.Among the foreseeable therapeutic approaches at the cellular level, nanoplatform-driven photothermal therapy is a thriving tool for the selective eradication of malignant tissues with minimal side effects to healthy ones.  Hence, chemically versatile, near-infrared absorbing plasmonic nanoparticles are distinctly appealing and most sought after as efficient photothermal agents.  These nanoparticles show a remarkable photothermal heat conversion efficiency (HCE) of 71.4%, which is among the highest for CuS systems and rivals that of plasmonic noble metal nanostructures.  These findings are of paramount relevance to the photothermal community, since they call for a standardization of the procedure for the evaluation of the HCE of proposed photothermal agents, in order to make the reported values universally and reliably comparable.
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