To address the energy crisis, tremendous efforts have been made on the conversion and storage of solar energy in the past. Sunlight-driven catalytic organic synthesis provides an alternative approach to solar energy technologies. However, the industrial and research field face two critical conundrums in fully using the solar energy. These two key problems are: robust harvesting of solar light in broad spectrum and effective coupling of the harvested photons into chemical reactions.
Based on inorganic solid precision chemistry and catalytic characteristic of plasmon at picosecond time scale, a research group led by professors XIONG Yujie from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), collaborating with Prof. ZHANG Qun research group of Prof. LUO Yi team, has recently designed a bimetallic Au-Pd core-shell nanostructures for solving these two problems.
As surface plasmon of metal nanostructures can efficiently couple photon energy onto solid surface and the plasmon-coupled energy may induce chemical transformations, a plasmonic component Au can be selected. Because metals are active catalysts, researchers rationally choose Pd as catalytic sites. Based on these two principles, researchers integrate Pd with Au into a fabricating alloy. The researchers design Au-Pd core-shell as bar-shaped nanostructures on the basis of the fact that this design enables broad-spectrum light harvesting because of their intrinsic plasmoinic bands location. Given the short time scales of electron-phonon scattering and charge combination, the parameters could be precisely controlled so as to maneuver photothermal conversion and hot-electron transfer. Based on this, researchers design the nanostructure to synergistically optimize the two effects on chemical transformations toward maximizing the plasmonic-catalytic efficiency.
In addition to achieve the low energy consumption in chemical manufacture, this approach also opens the possibility of substituting light-driven reactions for conventional thermal-based chemical manufacturing and promotes the rational design of plasmonic−catalytic nanomaterials.
This work was published in the Journal of The American Chemical Society entitled “Unraveling Surface Plasmon Decay in Core-Shell Nanostructures toward Broadband Light-Driven Catalytic Organic Synthesis”.
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Youth One Thousand Plan, the One Hundred Talent Project of the Chinese Academy of Science, Hefei Science Center, Pilot Projects of the Chinese Academy of Science and the important direction project Cultivation fund of the School and so on.
(SHAN Guohou, HFNL, USTC News Center)
