Watching electrons harvest light at the nanoscale

Nanowerk  August 17, 2020 Plasmon-enabled light-harvesting technologies require a better understanding of their fundamental operating principles and current limitations. An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Germany) investigated photoinduced electron transfer in a plasmonic model system composed of gold nanoparticles attached to a nanoporous film of TiO2. Using time-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy the researchers were able to count the numbers of transferred electrons. They found that only one in 1,000 photons generates an electron-hole pair and it takes less than a billionth of a second for the electron to come back from the titanium dioxide and […]