Optimizing Plasmonic Photocatalysis by Controlling the Temporal Distribution of Incident Photons

Of central interest in plasmonic photocatalysis is efficiency, defined as the ratio of the rate of chemical transformation to the power of the incident light. Efforts to enhance efficiency have focused largely on optimizing the photocatalyst structure and composition, reaction conditions, and reactor design. Here, we show that the temporal distribution of incident photons is another parameter that can be used to optimize efficiency. We illustrate the concept by varying the repetition rate of inc