Efficient plasmon-hot electron conversion in Ag–CsPbBr3 hybrid nanocrystals

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 1163
• Main Authors: Huang, Xinyu, Li, Hongbo, Zhang, Chunfeng, Tan, Shijing, Chen, Zhangzhang, Chen, Lan, Lu, Zhenda, Wang, Xiaoyong, Xiao, Min
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 11.03.2019; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 140/125; 639/624/400/1021; 639/925/357/354; 639/925/357/995; Conversion; Coupling; Crystals; Efficiency; Electron transfer; Electronics industry; Energy transfer; Heterostructures; Hot electrons; Humanities and Social Sciences; Metals; multidisciplinary; Nanocrystals; Optoelectronic devices; Perovskites; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Semiconductors; Silver
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09112-1

Hybrid metal/semiconductor nano-heterostructures with strong exciton-plasmon coupling have been proposed for applications in hot carrier optoelectronic devices. However, the performance of devices based on this concept has been limited by the poor efficiency of plasmon-hot electron conversion at the metal/semiconductor interface. Here, we report that the efficiency of interfacial hot excitation transfer can be substantially improved in hybrid metal semiconductor nano-heterostructures consisting of perovskite semiconductors. In Ag–CsPbBr 3 nanocrystals, both the plasmon-induced hot electron and the resonant energy transfer processes can occur on a time scale of less than 100 fs with quantum efficiencies of 50 ± 18% and 15 ± 5%, respectively. The markedly high efficiency of hot electron transfer observed here can be ascribed to the increased metal/semiconductor coupling compared with those in conventional systems. These findings suggest that hybrid architectures of metal and perovskite semiconductors may be excellent candidates to achieve highly efficient plasmon-induced hot carrier devices. Proposed devices exploiting the strong exciton-plasmon coupling are limited by the low efficiency of hot carrier generation. Here, Huang et al. study the efficiencies of different plasmon-hot electron conversion processes in metal/perovskite semiconductor nanocrystals to address this problem.