About the Seminar:

Plasmonic nanostructures have long been appreciated for their ability to harvest light and transform it into other forms, including thermal energy and chemical energy (through the production of high energy charge carriers, e.g. hot electrons and hot holes). Both hot charge carriers and elevated temperatures at nanoparticle surfaces can increase the efficiency of light-driven electrochemical reactions, yet untangling the relative contributions of these two effects is experimentally challenging. This talk will describe our work to isolate local heating effects from hot carrier effects as well as provide quantitative values for hot carrier energies using scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) on gold nanoparticles at semiconductor interfaces. We generate real temperature values as well as effective hot carrier temperatures, allowing us to understand how plasmon excitation promotes reactions on plasmon substrates.