报告题目：Carbon-Fixation by Plasmonic Catalysts

报告人: Prof. Prashant K. Jain

报告时间：2018年5月25日（周五）15:30-17:00

报告地点: B5-102; Time: May 25^th 3:30 pm

        欢迎广大师生参加！

报告人简介：Prashant K. Jain is currently an associate professor in department ofchemistry and the Materials Research LabinUniversity of Illinois - Urbana Champaign. He got his PhD degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. After that, he did his postdoc research at Harvard University in 2008 and then at University of California – Berkeley from 2009 to 2011 as a Miller Fellow and supervised by Prof. Paul Alivisatos. He has published more 70 papers as first or corresponding author on high profilejournals such as Nature Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Nano Letters,Journal of Physical ChemistryLettersetc.

摘要：Mimicking plant photosynthesis requires a synthetic photocatalyst that absorbs sunlight and uses that energy efficiently to convert CO₂ into energy-dense hydrocarbons. My talk will make the case that noble metal nanostructures, which exhibit collective free electron resonances called plasmons, may be well-suited to this task. Not only do plasmonic nanoparticles of Au, Ag, and Cu offer a means to absorb visible light efficiently, their strong-light-matter interaction can be paired with their ability to activate small molecules, such as CO₂. We have had preliminary success with plasmonic catalysts, which under visible-light-excitation, can drive kinetically challenging multi-electron multi-proton processes such as methane generation. Moreover, the product selectivity is controllable by the nature of the exciting light, which suggests that a novel phenomenon is at work. In order to understand the light-driven pathway for CO₂ reduction, we have probed with single-site spatial resolution the dynamics of a plasmonic photocatalyst under operando conditions. From captured intermediates and density functional theory simulations, we are beginning to understand the mechanism which plasmonic excitation activates physisorbed CO₂. It is clear that a close interplay between photoexcited states and surfaces is involved in this scheme of artificial photosynthesis.