T3 Funding Award

PI Hajimirza was awarded Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) funding for the project titled "Harvesting Light With Nanostructured Antennas For Solar Fuel Generation". This is a collaborative effort with co-PIs Dr. Francois Gabbai and Dr. Mathew Sheldon of the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M. Main group halides that support the photoreductive elimination of a halogen equivalent have attracted a great deal of recent interest because of their relevance to solar energy storage. While significant advances have been made, this approach is limited by the poor absorbance cross-sections that most main group halides display in the visible range thus impacting the efficiency of the process. To overcome these challenges, we propose a methodology to investigate the design of new plasmonic nanostructured antennas. The role of these antennas will be to harvest light and enhance it in an energy domain that matches the requirements of the molecular photoreductive process. The antennas will be optimized using a heuristic approach that combines experiments, theory, and numerical simulations. A feedback loop between these three components will result in novel nanoarchitectures in the photoreduction chemistry.