Plasmon-Enhanced Electrocatalysis

Exploiting essentially free renewable electricity sources has been italicized as an environmental-friendly and promising response to ever-rising energy consumptions, decreasing oil supplies, and imposing environmental concerns. Directly reflecting this strategy, the development of electrocatalytic technologies has gathered increasing notice. Employing plasmonic nanostructures and profiting from their light-responsivity and tunable surface plasmon resonance (SPR) absorption has found cumulative interest to enhance the energy efficiency of renewable electricity-driven catalytic systems. This approach strikingly opposes the methodologies in which the integration of plasmonic nanostructures as light harvesters to simultaneously extend the light absorption of wide bandgap semiconductors is primarily underlined. Here, we meticulously survey the potential application of plasmonic nanostructures in emerging exploratory works converting earth-abundant feedstocks such as water (H₂O), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and molecular nitrogen (N₂) into value-added fuels by using simple redox chemistry. Key scientific principles, mechanistic aspects, and benchmark systems coupling plasmonic architectures and state-of-the-art electrocatalysts in the development of plasmon-enhanced technologies are revised here in detail. In addition, this chapter sheds light on the operating plasmonic effects of the representative systems herein revised, and create future guidelines to disentangle the electrocatalytic properties, plasmonic effects, and electrochemical interactions established between neighboring nanocomponents.