Direct Plasmon-Driven Photoelectrocatalysis
- 6 August 2015
- journal article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Nano Letters
- Vol. 15 (9), 6155-6161
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02453
Abstract
Harnessing the energy from hot charge carriers is an emerging research area with the potential to improve energy conversion technologies.1-3 Here we present a novel plasmonic photoelectrode architecture carefully designed to drive photocatalytic reactions by efficient, nonradiative plasmon decay into hot carriers. In contrast to past work, our architecture does not utilize a Schottky junction, the commonly used building block to collect hot carriers. Instead, we observed large photocurrents from a Schottky-free junction due to direct hot electron injection from plasmonic gold nanoparticles into the reactant species upon plasmon decay. The key ingredients of our approach are (i) an architecture for increased light absorption inspired by optical impedance matching concepts,4 (ii) carrier separation by a selective transport layer, and (iii) efficient hot-carrier generation and injection from small plasmonic Au nanoparticles to adsorbed water molecules. We also investigated the quantum efficiency of hot electron injection for different particle diameters to elucidate potential quantum effects while keeping the plasmon resonance frequency unchanged. Interestingly, our studies did not reveal differences in the hot-electron generation and injection efficiencies for the investigated particle dimensions and plasmon resonances.Keywords
Funding Information
- Welch Foundation (C-1825)
- Division of Chemistry (CHE-1352579)
This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit:
- Plasmonic photocatalysisReports on Progress in Physics, 2013
- Plasmon Inducing Effects for Enhanced Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting: X-ray Absorption Approach to Electronic StructuresACS Nano, 2012
- Plasmonic-metal nanostructures for efficient conversion of solar to chemical energyNature Materials, 2011
- Plasmon Enhanced Solar-to-Fuel Energy ConversionNano Letters, 2011
- Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 to Hydrocarbon Fuels via Plasmon-Enhanced Absorption and Metallic Interband TransitionsACS Catalysis, 2011
- Polarization-Dependent Scanning Photoionization Microscopy: Ultrafast Plasmon-Mediated Electron Ejection Dynamics in Single Au NanorodsACS Nano, 2011
- Plasmon Resonant Enhancement of Photocatalytic Water Splitting Under Visible IlluminationNano Letters, 2011
- Multiphoton Scanning Photoionization Imaging Microscopy for Single-Particle Studies of Plasmonic Metal NanostructuresThe Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2010
- Quantum size effects in the surface-plasmon excitation of small metallic particles by electron-energy-loss spectroscopyPhysical Review B, 1992
- Correlated barrier hopping in NiO filmsPhysical Review B, 1991