Journal
NATURE NANOTECHNOLOGY
Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages 247-251Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2013.18
Keywords
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Funding
- Institute for Energy Efficiency
- Energy Frontier Research Center
- US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences [DE-SC0001009]
- MRSEC Program of the NSF [DMR 1121053]
- NSF-funded Materials Research Facilities Network
- ConvEne IGERT Program [NSF-DGE 0801627]
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Solar conversion to electricity or to fuels based on electron-hole pair production in semiconductors is a highly evolved scientific and commercial enterprise(1-10). Recently, it has been posited that charge carriers either directly transferred from the plasmonic structure to a neighbouring semiconductor (such as TiO2) or to a photocatalyst, or induced by energy transfer in a neighbouring medium, could augment photoconversion processes, potentially leading to an entire new paradigm in harvesting photons for practical use(11-16). The strong dependence of the wavelength at which the local surface plasmon can be excited on the nanostructure makes it possible, in principle, to design plasmonic devices that can harvest photons over the entire solar spectrum and beyond. So far, however, most such systems show rather small photocatalytic activity in the visible as compared with the ultraviolet(17-26). Here, we report an efficient, autonomous solar water-splitting device based on a gold nanorod array in which essentially all charge carriers involved in the oxidation and reduction steps arise from the hot electrons resulting from the excitation of surface plasmons in the nanostructured gold. Each nanorod functions without external wiring, producing 5 x 10(13) H-2 molecules per cm(2) per s under 1 sun illumination (AM 1.5 and 100 mW cm(-2)), with unprecedented long-term operational stability.
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