Epitaxial growth of highly symmetrical branched noble metal-semiconductor heterostructures with efficient plasmon-induced hot-electron transfer
Li Zhai, Sara T. Gebre, Bo Chen, Dan Xu, Junze Chen, Zijian Li, Yawei Liu, Hua Yang, Chongyi Ling, Yiyao Ge, Wei Zhai, Changsheng Chen, Lu Ma, Qinghua Zhang, Xuefei Li, Yujie Yan, Xinyu Huang, Lujiang Li, Zhiqiang Guan, Chen‐Lei Tao, Zhiqi Huang, Hongyi Wang, Jinzhe Liang, Ye Zhu, Chun‐Sing Lee, Peng Wang, Chunfeng Zhang, Lin Gu, Yonghua Du, Tianquan Lian, Hua Zhang, Xue‐Jun Wu
Abstract
Epitaxial growth is one of the most commonly used strategies to precisely tailor heterostructures with well-defined compositions, morphologies, crystal phases, and interfaces for various applications. However, as epitaxial growth requires a small interfacial lattice mismatch between the components, it remains a challenge for the epitaxial synthesis of heterostructures constructed by materials with large lattice mismatch and/or different chemical bonding, especially the noble metal-semiconductor heterostructures. Here, we develop a noble metal-seeded epitaxial growth strategy to prepare highly symmetrical noble metal-semiconductor branched heterostructures with desired spatial configurations, i.e., twenty CdS (or CdSe) nanorods epitaxially grown on twenty exposed (111) facets of Ag icosahedral nanocrystal, albeit a large lattice mismatch (more than 40%). Importantly, a high quantum yield (QY) of plasmon-induced hot-electron transferred from Ag to CdS was observed in epitaxial Ag-CdS icosapods (18.1%). This work demonstrates that epitaxial growth can be achieved in heterostructures composed of materials with large lattice mismatches. The constructed epitaxial noble metal-semiconductor interfaces could be an ideal platform for investigating the role of interfaces in various physicochemical processes.