Plasmon-Enhanced Nanoparticles in Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

We report a near-infrared-driven photoelectrochemical water splitting using ZnO nanorod-array decorated with CdTe quantum dots and plasmon-enhanced upconversion nanoparticles. The plasmon enhanced the intensity of the upconversion emission, which improved the photocurrent and the gas evolution rate of the photoelectrochemical reaction greatly. We will demonstrate a process of utilizing NIR to drive the photoelectrochemical water splitting reaction. The Au-UCNs can significantly enhance the upconversion emission intensity by plasmonic effect (Fig. 1). Thus, the enhancement of photocurrent and gas evolution was achieved. The results offer a convincing demonstration that energy can be converted from NIR to chemical fuel. We believe that our strategy is fundamental to the design of solar energy devices and should become an accepted technique for solar energy utilization at the NIR and IR regions. We also etched the p-type silicon wafer to fabricate microwire array as photocathode for the artificial photosynthetic water splitting under solar irradiation. After the decoration of siliver nanoparticles, the photocurrent of silicon microwire array can be increased up to ~38 mA/cm² under applying -1.0 V bias (Fig. 2).