  We consider a general problem of laser pulse heating of spherical metal
particles with the sizes ranging from nanometers to millimeters. We employ the
exact Mie solutions of the diffraction problem and solve heat-transfer
equations to determine the maximum temperature at the particle surface as a
function of optical and thermometric parameters of the problem. The main
attention is paid to the case when the thermometric conductivity of the
particle is much larger than that of the environment, as it is in the case of
metal particles in fluids. We show that in this case at any given finite
duration of the laser pulse the maximum temperature rise as a function of the
particle size reaches an absolute maximum at a certain finite size of the
particle, and we suggest simple approximate analytical expressions for this
dependence which covers the entire range of variations of the problem
parameters and agree well with direct numerical simulations.
