Abstract:

Light matter interaction is at the heart of numerous day-to-day technologies around us. This work attempt to expand the technological boundaries on two such fronts namely, solar fuels and precision plasmonics.

Sun provides 10,000 times more energy to earth in an hour than what we need in a year. Harnessing this energy efficiently can fulfil all our energy demands and unlock several new sustainable avenues for economic and technological growth. Intermittency is one of the key challenges with harnessing solar energy and storing it as fuel using photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting can be one scalable solution. The bottleneck for PEC is the development of a cost effective, stable, and efficient photoanode. In this work, we have designed scalable solution-based processes for the fabrication of nanostructured thin films of 4 potential photoanode candidates and critically evaluated them for their potential for photoelectrochemical water oxidation.

Colloidal plasmonic metal nanocrystals that support a strong and tunable localised surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) in the visible and near infra-red region are of great interest for a variety of applications, specifically for their ability to provide strongly enhanced electromagnetic fields in a nm3 region (hot spots) due to plasmonic coupling between proximate nanocrystals - dimers. This can be the basis of single molecule detection by surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Despite the decades of research in the field, the high synthesis of monodisperse dimers remains a major challenge. In this work we have attempted to design a simple, one pot quantitative synthesis of monodisperse NC dimers with controlled gap size using light.