Catalysis with TiO2/gold nanocomposites. Effect of metal particle size on the Fermi level equilibration.
By V. Subramanian, E. Wolf, Prashant Kamat. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2004
1,888 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Photoexcited semiconductor nanoparticles undergo charge equilibration when they are in contact with metal nanoparticles. Such a charge distribution has direct influence in dictating the energetics of the composite by shifting the Fermi level to more negative potentials. The transfer of electrons to Au nanoparticles has now been probed by exciting TiO(2) nanoparticles under steady-state and laser pulse excitation. Equilibration with the C(60)/C(60)(-) redox couple provides a means to determine the apparent Fermi level of the TiO(2)-Au composite system. The size-dependent shift in the apparent Fermi level of the TiO(2)-Au composite (20 mV for 8-nm diameter and 40 mV for 5-nm and 60 mV for 3-nm gold nanoparticles) shows the ability of Au nanoparticles to influence the energetics by improving the photoinduced charge separation. Isolation of individual charge-transfer steps from UV-excited TiO(2) --> Au --> C(60) has provided mechanistic and kinetic information on the role of metal in semiconductor-assisted photocatalysis and size-dependent catalytic activity of metal-semiconductor nanocomposites.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12e2c6d5c00f7ccfad376b5156c21583e8b53d0e
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Citations in the corpus
- Plasmonic photocatalysis (2013, background): “Charge carrier separation has been attributed to the photocatalytic enhancement in many studies [41, 45, 48, 50, 60, 114, 115] but that is mostly by logic reasoning (e.”
- A review and recent developments in photocatalytic water-splitting using TiO2 for hydrogen production (2007, background): “As electrons accumulate on the noble metal particles, their Fermi levels shift closer to the conduction band of TiO2 [50,52,53], resulting in more negative energy levels.”