Noble metal nanostructures have been the focus of study for many decades because of their use in real or potential applications. It has been demonstrated that the intrinsic properties of metal nanostructure are usual closely related to the shape

size

and structure. Many methods are used to prepare noble metal nano-particles with different kinds of shape such as nanospheres

nanorods

nanobelts

nanodisks

and nanoprism. Colloidal hollow gold has been studied extensively in recent years due to their interesting physical properties and promising applications. For example

the special absorption of hollow gold nanostructures in the NIR region makes these materials as ideal candidates for photothermally trigged drug releasing in tissues

which is quite useful in the biomedicine. Several groups are studying in this domain. An application of this technology to thermal ablative therapy for cancer was described. For these reasons

hollow nanostructure produced by a shape-controlled procedure has become a new and interesting research focus. The gold nanoshells were prepared by an easy wet-chemical synthesis method and Ag nanoparticles were used as the templates. TEM images indicated the shells were sphere in shape and the size was about 20 nm. The size was homogenous and no hard agglomerates. The absorption in the optical resonance shifted from visible (~400 nm) to near-infrared (NIR

~800 nm) with the increase of the dosage of HAuCl

4

. The temperature grads (Δ

T

) of the gold nanoshell hydrosol under the exposure of an 808 nm optical-fiber laser were measured. The highest Δ

T

was 5.5℃ (1.9 W

irradiation area was 1 mm

2

). The gold nanoshell hydrosol is promising to be used in biomedicine such as photothermal cancer therapy and photothermally triggered drug release for its special photothermal convert property

as the cancer tissues will be killed at 42℃.