Taking the Heat Off of Plasmonic Chemistry

By P. Jain. Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2019

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several chemical reactions catalyzed by plasmonic nanoparticles show enhanced rates under visible-light-excitation of the localized surface plasmon resonance of the nanoparticles. But it has been argued that there is an associated photothermal effect that can complicate the analysis and/or interpretation of the nature of the role played by plasmon excitation. This Viewpoint discusses this dilemma and provides some best practices for accounting for photothermal contributions in plasmon-excitation-driven chemistry. A classification of plasmonic chemistry into plasmonic photocatalysis and plasmonic photosynthesis is also proposed. It is argued that photosynthetic reactions, which require a Gibb's free energy input, constitute an ultimate test of the non-thermal, photochemical action of plasmon excitation.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/717e51881ff8c224fb5b4268b192976665fceed6