Catalysis: Plasmon‐Assisted Indirect Light Absorption Engineering in Small Transition Metal Catalyst Nanoparticles (Advanced Optical Materials 11/2015)

T. J. Antosiewicz, C. Wadell, and C. Langhammer show on page 1591 how silver nanodisk-shaped optical antennas harvest energy from an incident light beam via excitation of localized surface plasmons. The energy of the plasmon is then coupled into adjacent much smaller palladium nanoparticles, increasing their light absorption by more than an order of magnitude on average. It is expected that this energy transfer pathway can be exploited to increase hot electron-mediated catalytic reaction rates on small transition metal nanoparticles.