Probing Interfaces in Plasmonic Gold-Titania Nanorods

Hybrid plasmonic-semiconductor nanoparticles combine strong light absorption in metals with longer-lived charge carriers in semiconductors, making efficient hot-electron injection across the metal-semiconductor interface key for applications such as photocatalysis. In this project, you will study and engineer the interface between gold nanorods and a TiO2 shell: different crystallization pathways will be explored to improve the interface while preserving plasmonic properties, and charge transfer efficiency will be measured using single-particle dark-field scattering and (time-resolved) photoluminescence, correlated with structural data from electron microscopy and tomography.