Issue 19, 2020

Thermal effects – an alternative mechanism for plasmon-assisted photocatalysis

Abstract

Recent experiments claimed that the catalysis of reaction rates in numerous bond-dissociation reactions occurs via the decrease of activation barriers driven by non-equilibrium (“hot”) electrons in illuminated plasmonic metal nanoparticles. Thus, these experiments identify plasmon-assisted photocatalysis as a promising path for enhancing the efficiency of various chemical reactions. Here, we argue that what appears to be photocatalysis is much more likely thermo-catalysis, driven by the well-known plasmon-enhanced ability of illuminated metallic nanoparticles to serve as heat sources. Specifically, we point to some of the most important papers in the field, and show that a simple theory of illumination-induced heating can explain the extracted experimental data to remarkable agreement, with minimal to no fit parameters. We further show that any small temperature difference between the photocatalysis experiment and a control experiment performed under external heating is effectively amplified by the exponential sensitivity of the reaction, and is very likely to be interpreted incorrectly as “hot” electron effects.

Graphical abstract: Thermal effects – an alternative mechanism for plasmon-assisted photocatalysis

Associated articles

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
20 Dec. 2019
Accepted
20 Apr. 2020
First published
21 Apr. 2020
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2020,11, 5017-5027

Thermal effects – an alternative mechanism for plasmon-assisted photocatalysis

Y. Dubi, I. W. Un and Y. Sivan, Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 5017 DOI: 10.1039/C9SC06480J

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