Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Certain noble metal nanostructures as hetero-geneous photocatalysts have drawn significant attention in therecent past because of their unique optical properties whichlead to the excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance(LSPR). The LSPR concentrates electromagneticfields to thesurfaces and its relaxation processes can convert photonenergy to energetic charge carriers or heat, which can besubsequently harvested to enhance surface catalysis. Here, wereport the catalytic performance of a novel plasmonicnanostructure, disk-shaped nanoporous gold (NPG) nano-particles or simply NPG disks, using a well-tested reductionpathway of resazurin to resorufin. We show that the catalyticreaction rate of NPG disks is enhanced by 10-fold upon external light illumination because of the excitation of LSPR. Theplasmon-enhanced catalytic reaction follows a linear-to-superlinear transition in the rate dependence on the input light power.In addition, the light input results in a room temperature reaction rate equivalent to that of an ambient temperature of 70°C.Together, the results support that hot charge carriers play the dominant role in the enhancement.