Nano-localized hot-carrier chemistry published in Nature Commun.
E. Cortes, W. Xie, J. Cambiasso, A. Jermyn, R. Sundararaman, P. Narang, S. Schlucker and S. A. Maier, “Plasmonic hot electron transport drives nano-localized chemistry”, Nature Commun. 8, 14880 (2017) (Preprint: arXiv:1607.05657)
Experimental collaborators at Imperial College London and University of Duisburg-Essen show that redox reactions driven by photo-excited electrons are localized to within 15 nm of the regions of highest electromagnetic field in plasmonic silver nanoantennas. Our theory team at Cambridge, Harvard and RPI predict the spatially-resolved energy distributions of hot electrons generated from plasmon decay. We find an interesting inverse relationship between the energy of carriers required to drive the reactions, and the spatial resolution achievable. Carrier energy is a useful knob to control a trade-off between efficiency of energy conversion and spatial resolution of photodetection!