Transparent oxides forming conductor/insulator/conductor heterojunctions for photodetection.

Photoexcited hot electrons from conductors can be injected into the conduction bands of wide-bandgap materials, thus enabling the visible and near-infrared (NIR) photoactivities of light-harvesting devices. While metals have been dominantly used as conductors to excite hot electrons, we demonstrate that transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) can also be used for this purpose. Trilayer structures consisting of a thin dielectric layer sandwiched by TCOs show photoresponsiveness in UV, visible, as well as NIR wavelength range. As these trilayer structures are transparent, they can be used to monitor light without blocking it.

Tunable Nanoantennas for Surface Enhanced Infrared Absorption Spectroscopy by Colloidal Lithography and Post-Fabrication Etching.

We fabricated large-area metallic (Al and Au) nanoantenna arrays on Si substrates using cost-effective colloidal lithography with different micrometer-sized polystyrene spheres. Variation of the sphere size leads to tunable plasmon resonances in the middle infrared (MIR) range. The enhanced near-fields allow us to detect the surface phonon polaritons in the natural SiO2 thin layers. We demonstrated further tuning capability of the resonances by employing dry etching of the Si substrates with the nanoantennas acting as the etching masks. The effective refractive index of the nanoantenna surroundings is efficiently decreased giving rise to blueshifts of the resonances. In addition, partial removal of the Si substrates elevates the nanoantennas from the high-refractive-index substrates making more enhanced near-fields accessible for molecular sensing applications as demonstrated here with surface-enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA) spectroscopy for a thin polymer film. We also directly compared the plasmonic enhancement from the Al and Au nanoantenna arrays.

Visible-light photodecomposition of acetaldehyde by TiO2-coated gold nanocages: plasmon-mediated hot electron transport via defect states.

Skeletal gold nanocages (Au NCs) are synthesized and coated with TiO2 layers (TiO2-Au NCs). The TiO2-Au NCs exhibit enhanced photodecomposition activity toward acetaldehyde under visible light (>400 nm) illumination because hot electrons are generated over the Au NCs by local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) and efficiently transported across the metal/semiconductor interface via the defect states of TiO2.