TiN@TiO₂Core–Shell Nanoparticles as Plasmon‐Enhanced Photosensitizers: The Role of Hot Electron Injection

Abstract

Metal-semiconductor heterostructures have attracted a lot of attention due to their ability to enhance photovoltaic and photocatalytic processes via plasmonic effects. Thus far, most of the proposed heterostructures are designed with noble metals and the potential of alternative plasmonic materials, such as titanium nitride (TiN), is not yet well explored. In this work, TiN@TiO 2 core-shell nanoparticles (NPs) are synthesized and proposed as

Rational design of bimetallic photocatalysts based on plasmonically-derived hot carriers

“…2b. Theoretically, the extraction efficiency can be relatively easily evaluated considering a hot-carrier transport in Au-Pt core-shell nanoparticles, which for the Au and Pt effective electron masses and Fermi energies, gives approximately 50% [34,35], which is of the same order of magnitude as the estimates from the experiment. The measured efficiency -the ratio of a number of extracted hot electrons to a number of absorbed photons -is higher than those reported for other types of nanoparticle architectures [36][37][38] and comparable to the hot-carrier injection efficiency in metal-semiconductor nanostructures [39].…”

“…The detailed estimates of the competition between the Landau damping and other nonradiative LSP-decay processes[34] in Au-Pt nanoparticles are beyond the scope of this work, and for the order of magnitude estimations of a lower bound of the hot-carrier extraction efficiency, the hot-carrier generation efficiency can be taken as ∼1.Under these assumptions, the lower bound of the hot-electron extraction efficiency is estimated to be of the order of 10% for the optimized configuration of the Au-Pt hetero-nanoparticles and 20 times lower for the least performing configuration in Fig.2b. Theoretically, the extraction efficiency can be relatively easily evaluated considering a hot-carrier transport in Au-Pt core-shell nanoparticles, which for the Au and Pt effective electron masses and Fermi energies, gives approximately 50%[34,35], which is of the same order of magnitude as the estimates from the experiment. The measured efficiency -the ratio of a number of extractedOpen Access Article.…”

The role of heat generation and fluid flow in plasmon-enhanced reduction-oxidation reactions

“…Detailed measurements and/or calculations of the temperature distribution in the studied samples indeed constituted a central role in several recent demonstrations of non-thermal effects in plasmon-assisted photocatalysis [25][26][27][28] . However, while the simple thermal calculations as done so far were sufficient for relatively simple scenarios, they may not be sufficient to account for more complicated ones.…”

Enhanced fluorescence of CsPbBr3/ZnO heterojunction enabled by titanium nitride nanoparticles

“…These materials are inexpensive and require a simple preparation method. Therefore, they are promising candidates for effective excitation of hot electrons in the visible region of the spectrum [21][22][23].…”