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Utilization of Plasmonic and Photonic Crystal Nanostructures for Enhanced Micro- and Nanoparticle Manipulation
Published on: September 27, 2011
Interfacial Construction of Plasmonic Nanostructures for the Utilization of the Plasmon-Excited Electrons and Holes
Chao Zhan1, Zi-Yuan Wang1, Xia-Guang Zhang1
1State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering , Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials (iChEM), Xiamen University , Xiamen 361005 , China.
Abstract:
Surface plasmons (SPs) are able to promote chemical reactions through the participation of the energetic charge carriers produced following plasmons decay. Using p-aminothiophenol (PATP) as a probe molecule, we used surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to follow the progress of its transformation, in situ, to investigate systematically the role of hot electrons and holes. The energetic carrier mediated PATP oxidation was found to occur even in the absence of oxygen, and was greatly influenced by the interface region near the gold surface. The observed reaction, which occurred efficiently on Au@TiO2 nanostructures, did not happen on bare gold nanoparticles (NPs) or core-shell nanostructures when a silicon oxide layer blocked access to the gold. Moreover, the product of the PATP oxidation with oxygen on Au@TiO2 nanostructures differed from what was obtained without oxygen, suggesting that the mechanism through which "hot holes" mediated the oxidation reaction was different from that operating with oxygen activated by hot electrons.
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