Enhanced Solar‐to‐Hydrogen Generation with Broadband Epsilon‐Near‐Zero Nanostructured Photocatalysts

• DOI: 10.1002/adma.201701165
• Publication Date: 2017-05-08T12:22:48Z
• Authors: Yi Tian; Francisco Pelayo ...; Cao‐Thang Dinh; Gael Favraud; Marcella Bonifazi; Jun Li; Min Liu; Xixiang Zhang; Xueli Zheng; Md. Golam Kibria; Sjoerd Hoogland; David Sinton; Edward H. Sargent; Andrea Fratalocchi
• Keywords: Zero (linguistics)

The direct conversion of solar energy into fuels or feedstock is an attractive approach to address increasing demand renewable sources. Photocatalytic systems relying on the photoexcitation metals have been explored this end, a strategy that exploits decay plasmonic resonances hot carriers. An efficient carrier generation and collection requires, ideally, their be enclosed within few tens nanometers at metal interface, but it challenging achieve across broadband spectrum. Here authors demonstrate new photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution based epsilon‐near‐zero metamaterials. designed these strong light confinement interface entire Using electron loss spectroscopy, prove carriers are generated in fashion 10 nm system. resulting achieves production rate 9.5 µmol h −1 cm −2 exceeds, by factor 3.2, best previously reported plasmonic‐based photocatalysts dissociation H 2 with 50 stable operation.