(Invited) Ultrafast Studies of Plasmonic and Photonic Structures for Energy Conversion Applications

Abstract

Hybrid materials with plasmonic and/or photonic components are of great interest for enhancing the efficiency of light harvesting and energy conversion processes. Those processes that occur on an ultrafast timescale can be very impactful on overall efficiencies of conversion, and therefore are important to understand. These processes can be, for example, the dynamics of hot plasmonic electron decay or the rate of excitonic migration within materials. In this talk, I describe studies of ultrafast spectroscopy and imaging in several types of plasmonic and photonic structures. These include the ultrafast plasmonic behavior of refractory metals and also gap plasmon metamaterials. Efforts to understand how to create greater numbers of energetic carriers, and how to monitor for their presence spectroscopically, are described. Also described are studies of exciton transport in biomimetic materials, particularly to understand how the concentration and orientation of chromophores impact the efficiency of exciton migration. Also described are metal-organic-frameworks and their relevance to supporting photoinduced exciton transport, with ultrafast photoluminescence used to characterize transport in optically scattering media. Finally I briefly describe the user science capabilities of the Center for Nanoscale Materials. This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.