Energy transfer-enhanced photocatalytic reduction of protons within quantum dot light-harvesting-catalyst assemblies.

ABSTRACT: Excitonic energy transfer (EnT) is the mechanism by which natural photosynthetic systems funnel energy from hundreds of antenna pigments to a single reaction center, which allows multielectron redox reactions to proceed with high efficiencies in low-flux natural light. This paper describes the use of electrostatically assembled CdSe quantum dot (QD) aggregates as artificial light harvesting-reaction center units for the photocatalytic reduction of H⁺ to H₂, where excitons are funneled through EnT from sensitizer QDs (sQDs) to catalyst QDs (cQDs). Upon increasing the sensitizer-to-catalyst ratio in the aggregates from 1:2 to 20:1, the number of excitons delivered to each cQD (via EnT) per excitation of the system increases by a factor of nine. At the optimized sensitiz

SUBMITTER: Kodaimati MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6099859 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature