[18a-E101-1~12] 12.5 Organic solar cells

[18a-E101-1] Observation of quantized electronic states in 10 nm gold nanoparticles

Bochao Li¹, Hao Li¹, Chang Yang¹, Boyu Ji¹, JIngquan Lin¹, 〇Toshihisa Tomie^1,2 (1.CUST, 2.AIST)

Keywords:quantized electronic states, hot electron, gold nanoparticles

Chemical reactions including solar cells are controlled by transfer of “hot electrons”. It is well known that nanoparticles (NPs) have high chemical activities, however, all previous models assumed the Fermi level as the ground state as shown in Fig.1. Because hot electrons should quickly decay to the ground in this model, transfer efficiency should be very low. We propose that the essential property of NPs is in discrete states which reduce the activation energy DE for transfer of hot electrons as shown in Fig.1. We disclosed a novel diagnostic of excited states in NPs¹⁾ and reported an excited state in Au NPs²⁾. This paper reports the observation of quantized discrete electronic states in 10 nm diameter Au NPs.