Solar-Powered Plasmon-Enhanced Heterogeneous Catalysis

Surface plasmon enhanced silicon solar cells

Thin-film solar cells have the potential to significantly decrease the cost of photovoltaics. Light trapping is particularly critical in such thin-film crystalline silicon solar cells in order to increase light absorption and hence cell efficiency. In this article we investigate the suitability of localized surface plasmons on silver nanoparticles for enhancing the absorbance of silicon solar c...

Porosity-enhanced solar powered hydrogen generation in GaN photoelectrodes

Plasmon-Enhanced Light Absorption in GaAs Nanowire Array Solar Cells

In this paper, we propose a plasmon-enhanced solar cell structure based on a GaAs nanowire array decorated with metal nanoparticles. The results show that by engineering the metallic nanoparticles, localized surface plasmon could be excited, which can concentrate the incident light and propagate the energy to nanowires. The surface plasmon can dramatically enhance the absorbance of near-bandgap...

Plasmon-enhanced photothermal response in heterogeneous metallic trimers

Heat generation in plasmonic nanostructures has attracted enormous attention due to the ability of these nanostructures to generate high temperatures in nanoscale volumes using far-field irradiation, enabling applications ranging from photothermal therapy to fast (sub-nanosecond) thermal optical switching. Here we investigate the optical and thermal response of a heterogeneous trimer structure ...

Coupling Solar Energy into Reactions: Materials Design for Surface Plasmon-Mediated Catalysis.

Enabled by surface plasmons, noble metal nanostructures can interact with and harvest incident light. As such, they may serve as unique media to generate heat, supply energetic electrons, and provide strong local electromagnetic fields for chemical reactions through different mechanisms. This solar-to-chemical pathway provides a new approach to solar energy utilization, alternative to conventio...