Journal
NANO LETTERS
Volume 11, Issue 12, Pages 5548-5552Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/nl203457v
Keywords
Plasmonics; photoconductance; gold nanoparticles; titania; impedance spectroscopy
Categories
Funding
- Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies through U.S. Army Research Office [DAAD19-03-D-0004]
- National Science Foundation [DMR-0080034, DMR-0216466]
- Institute for Energy Efficiency, an Energy Frontier Research Center
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences [DE-SC0001009]
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A fruitful paradigm in the development of low-cost and efficient photovoltaics is to dope or otherwise photosensitize wide band gap semiconductors in order to improve their light harvesting ability for light with sub-band-gap photon energies.(1-8) Here, we report significant photosensitization of TiO(2) due to the direct injection by quantum tunneling of hot electrons produced in the decay of localized surface-plasmon polaritons excited in gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) embedded in the semiconductor (TiO(2)). Surface plasmon decay produces electron-hole pairs in the gold.(9-15) We propose that a significant fraction of these electrons tunnel into the semiconductor's conduction band resulting in a significant electron current in the TiO(2) even when the device is illuminated with light with photon energies well below the semiconductor's band gap. Devices fabricated with (nonpercolating) multilayers of AuNPs in a TiO(2) film produced over 1000-fold increase in photoconductance when illuminated at 600 nm over what TiO(2) films devoid of AuNPs produced. The overall current resulting from illumination with visible light is similar to 50% of the device current measured with UV (h omega > E(g) band gap) illumination. The above observations suggest that plasmonic nanostructures (which can be fabricated with absorption properties that cover the full solar spectrum) can function as a viable alternative to organic photosensitizers for photovoltaic and photodetection applications.
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