Ben-Yakar, A., D. Eversole, and S. X. Guo, "Plasmonic laser nanoablation", US Patent 7834331, issued on 11/16/2010.

• This patent covers the nanoscale ablation of materials and tissue using plasmonically-enhanced ultrafast laser pulses in the near-field of nanoparticles. The patent is based on the work done in the Ben-Yakar Group for the application of this technique to nanofabrication and targeted cellular manipulation. 

See related papers:

PLN of silicon with gold nanoparticles: Eversole et al. and Harrison et al.

PLN of glass using carbon nanotubes: Guo et al.

Review of PLN for biomedical applications: Ben-Yakar et al.