PILOT

In plasmonic catalysis, photo-excitation is known to enhance reaction rates, which was attributed to the generation of « hot » electrons in nano-sized metals. In the past years, this scenario has been put into question, where previous results were re-interpreted in terms of photo-thermal heating, generating a debate in the international scientific community. This possible misinterpretation is in part attributed to wrong temperature measurements in the vicinity of metallic nano-surface, due to inappropriate measurement methodology. Here we propose a methodology to evaluate the contributions from the thermal and non-thermal contributions to the reaction rate based on optical spectroscopy, in order to bring answers to this debate. Finally, we propose to investigate two approaches to boost the photo-catalytic properties of self-assembled plasmonic nanoparticles based on recent results. The first consists of enhancing hot electron generation based on coherent plasmon excitation, so-called « plasmonic super-radiance », a recently discovered collective plasmon excitation. The second consists in exploiting hot électrons produced from non-radiative dark interlayer plasmonic modes in nanoparticle multilayers, which have been shown recently to possibly allow enhanced hot electron generation through non radiative plasmonic decay pathways. .