Near-Infrared Plasmonic-Enhanced Solar Energy Harvest for Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Reactions

• DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b00950
• Publication Date: 2015-09-07T09:27:08Z
• Authors: Jiabin Cui; Yongjia Li; Lei Liu; Lin Chen; Jun Xu; Jingwen Ma; Gang Fang; Enbo Zhu; Hao Wu; Lixia Zhao; Leyu Wang; Yu Huang
• Keywords: Solar energy conversion

We report a highly efficient photocatalyst comprised of Cu7S4@Pd heteronanostructures with plasmonic absorption in the near-infrared (NIR)-range. Our results indicated that strong NIR facilitated hot carrier transfer from Cu7S4 to Pd, which subsequently promoted catalytic reactions on Pd metallic surface. confirmed such enhancement mechanism could effectively boost sunlight utilization wide range photocatalytic reactions, including Suzuki coupling reaction, hydrogenation nitrobenzene, and oxidation benzyl alcohol. Even under irradiation at 1500 nm low power density (0.45 W/cm2), these demonstrated excellent activities. Under solar illumination as 40 mW/cm2, nearly 80–100% conversion was achieved within 2 h for all three types organic reactions. Furthermore, recycling experiments showed were stable retain their structures high activity after five cycles. The reported synthetic protocol can be easily extended other Cu7S4@M (M = Pt, Ag, Au) catalysts, offering new solution design fabricate effective photocatalysts broad material choices energy chemical an environmentally friendly manner.