Chiral semiconductor nanorod heterostructures with high photocatalysis activity

摘要： Chiral semiconductor nanorods and their heterostructures have attracted intense attention. In this work, it was shown that chiral amino acids on CdSe@CdS semiconductor nanorods (SNR) displayed circular dichroism bands (CD, 200–480 nm). Longer SNRs were found to induce stronger CD intensities, while an increase in the SNR diameter led to a clear CD band redshift. Multi-site post-growth of platinum (Pt) and gold (Au) further enhanced the CD intensity and induced CD band transitions. Electromagnetic calculations revealed that the metal post-growth gave rise to a strong electromagnetic field enhancement, with Pt inducing a stronger enhancement than Au. The optimized chiral multi-sites platinum on SNR displayed higher photocatalytic activities manifested that the deposited metal endowed energy transfer and enhanced the separation of photo-excited electrons and holes. These findings demonstrated that the multi-sites deposited metal provided a method to produce strong optical activity of nanostructures by adjusting the morphology of the semiconductor nanorod.