Surface plasmonic catalysis based on molecular optomechanics

¹ Key Laboratory of Artificial Structures and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education) - 800 DongChuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University - 800 DongChuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China

^(a) zhukadi@sjtu.edu.cn (corresponding author)

Received: 13 September 2021
Accepted: 20 January 2022

Abstract

Nowadays, researchers find that the surface plasmons can mediate some chemical reactions through the generation of the confined plasmonic field, excited electrons, and local heating effect. In this article we suggest a new surface plasmonic photocatalysis mechanism based on the molecular optomechanics which is not considered before. A reaction kinetic model was established to achieve a quantitative study of catalytic efficiency. The catalytic mechanism is not limited to a specific chemical reaction, all molecules with Raman activity can be accelerated dramatically in reaction. For molecules with different mechanical properties, the corresponding optomechanical catalytic pathway needs to be selected. We hope that this work will provide guidance for achieving strong or even ultrastrong catalyses under specific optical conditions. We further demonstrate that the optomechanical effects can also be used for the deceleration, which provides the possibility to design a highly tunable chemical reaction system. We believe that the quantum photochemistry will be further developed and widely used in future research.