Plasmonic single-molecule redox published in Nature Commun.
B. de Nijs, F. Benz, S. J. Barrow, D. O. Sigle, R. Chikkaraddy, A. Palma, C. Carnegie, M. Kamp, R. Sundararaman, P. Narang, O. A. Scherman and J. J. Baumberg, “Plasmonic tunnel junctions for single-molecule redox chemistry”, Nature Commun. 8, 998 (2017)
The Baumberg group at Cambridge show that plasmonic tunnel junctions utilizing a “nanoparticle on mirror” geometry can controllably drive highly-localized redox reactions, down to the single molecule level. This single-molecule sensitivity allows probing the mechanisms of such reactions with unprecedented control and resolution. With first-principles calculations of hot carrier generation and transport, we show that high energy carriers generated by the plasmon decay are indeed localized to the gap, so that both the driving of the chemical reaction and its detection are localized to the single-molecule level.