Enhanced Solar‐to‐Hydrogen Generation with Broadband Epsilon‐Near‐Zero Nanostructured Photocatalysts |
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Authors: | Yi Tian Francisco Pelayo García de Arquer Cao‐Thang Dinh Gael Favraud Marcella Bonifazi Jun Li Min Liu Xixiang Zhang Xueli Zheng Md. Golam Kibria Sjoerd Hoogland David Sinton Edward H. Sargent Andrea Fratalocchi |
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Affiliation: | 1. PRIMALIGHT, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia;2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;3. Division of Physical Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia;4. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
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Abstract: | The direct conversion of solar energy into fuels or feedstock is an attractive approach to address increasing demand of renewable energy sources. Photocatalytic systems relying on the direct photoexcitation of metals have been explored to this end, a strategy that exploits the decay of plasmonic resonances into hot carriers. An efficient hot carrier generation and collection requires, ideally, their generation to be enclosed within few tens of nanometers at the metal interface, but it is challenging to achieve this across the broadband solar spectrum. Here the authors demonstrate a new photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution based on metal epsilon‐near‐zero metamaterials. The authors have designed these to achieve broadband strong light confinement at the metal interface across the entire solar spectrum. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy, the authors prove that hot carriers are generated in a broadband fashion within 10 nm in this system. The resulting photocatalyst achieves a hydrogen production rate of 9.5 µmol h?1 cm?2 that exceeds, by a factor of 3.2, that of the best previously reported plasmonic‐based photocatalysts for the dissociation of H2 with 50 h stable operation. |
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Keywords: | artificial photosynthesis hot electron generation hydrogen generation, photocatalysts |
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