Plasmon-Coupled Resonance Energy Transfer and Photocatalysis: Theory and Application

This chapter describes two very active topics in the field of plasmonics: energy transfer and photocatalysis. In plasmonic photocatalysis, light in the visible or near-infrared interacts with Ag or Au (or other) nanoparticles (NPs), exciting collective excitations of the conduction electrons known as plasmons, and the plasmons subsequently dephase to give electron–hole pairs, and these then cause chemical reactions in molecules that are nearby the NPs. The chapter provides a review of the current experiments and theory in this area, especially highlighting recent nonadiabatic dynamics studies that have simulated this process in real time for the photocatalytic dissociation of H₂ on a Au NP. In plasmon-coupled resonance energy transfer (PC-RET), electromagnetic (EM) energy transfers between a donor molecule and an acceptor molecule, with a nearby Ag or Au particle serving as a plasmonically excited intermediate to enhance the transfer rate. The chapter reviews recent experimental literature in this area, and then it presents a comprehensive study of the theory of PC-RET, emphasizing the role of electrodynamics (ED), and including both the purely classical theory of energy transfer and theory based on Fermi’s Golden rule.