Proceedings of September Meeting 2016 (NFM16)
Publication date: 14th June 2016
It is well-known that bulk copper electrodes electrochemically reduce CO2 at high overpotentials [1]. Typical products are CO, ethylene and methane; their distribution sensitively depends on the electrode surface and the reaction conditions.
Our aim is to integrate such metal catalysts into a photoelectrochemical solar cell to directly transform solar energy into chemical fuels. This approach should increase the efficiency by exploiting the interaction of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) with the catalyst surface. SPPs enhance the electric field close to the metal surface [2], which is predicted to strengthen the adsorption of reactants and to polarize intermediates leading to lower overpotentials and a higher selectivity.
We realize such a system by structuring a silicon substrate with chessboard arrays of gold nanodisks. They can be electrochemically plated by copper which is the only material known to reduce CO2 to methane and ethylene.
With experiments and simulations we demonstrate that the plasmonic resonances of the gold nanostructures not only depend on the substrate material, size and shape of the nanostructures which has already been reported [3,4,5], but also on the fabrication method and thus on the metal-substrate interface.
[1] Y. Hori, et al., Chemistry letters, 1695-1698 (1985).
[2] S. Sun et al., Catalysis Communications 11, 4, 290-293, (2009).
[3] M. W. Knight, et al., Nano Letters 9, 5, 2188-2192 (2009).
[4] K.-S. Lee et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 110, 39, 19220-19225 (2006).
[5] K. L. Kelly et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 107, 3, 668-677 (2003).
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