Abstract
The development of new catalysts for oxidation reactions is of central importance for many industrial processes. Plasmonic catalysis involves photoexcitation of templates/chips to drive and enhance oxidation of target molecules. Raman-based sensing of target molecules can also be enhanced by these templates. This provides motivation for the rational design, characterization, and experimental demonstration of effective template nanostructures. In this paper, we report on a template comprising silver nanoparticles on aligned peptide nanotubes, contacted with a microfabricated chip in a dry environment. Efficient plasmonic catalysis for oxidation of molecules such as p-aminothiophenol results from facile trans-template charge transfer, activated and controlled by application of an electric field. Raman detection of biomolecules such as glucose and nucleobases are also dramatically enhanced by the template. A reduced quantum mechanical model is formulated, comprising a minimum description of key components. Calculated nanotube-metal-molecule charge transfer is used to understand the catalytic mechanism and shows this system is well-optimized.
Highlights
The development of new catalysts for oxidation reactions is of central importance for many industrial processes
These results further demonstrate the feasibility of using FF-PNTs in electronic devices, and provide a platform to explore the influence on SERS of an applied electric field
Heat generated from the FF-PNT/Ag NPs template with PATP was measured during the use of an electric field (Supplementary Fig. 17); we find that the temperature increases linearly with field strength
Summary
The development of new catalysts for oxidation reactions is of central importance for many industrial processes. We show an increase in probability and efficiency of both chemical reactions and SERS detection through electrooptical synergy, using a microfabricated chip design (in air rather than electrochemical)[2,3,4] This is achieved through the use of a plasmonic-semiconductor system based on aligned diphenylalanine peptide nanotube (FF-PNTs) wide band gap semiconductors[10,11,12,13,14,15]. We demonstrate that this same approach can be used to enhance the strength of Raman scattering from molecules with small Raman cross-sections for example glucose and DNA-based molecules, establishing the potential of our template design for sensitive detection and analytics This approach is versatile and can be applied to a range of plasmonic metal nanoparticle and semiconductor combinations
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