Early-time photodynamics of ruthenium-based photocatalysts for light-induced hydrogen generation
The global energy consumption is predominantly relying on fossil fuels. Utilization of these limited resources results in serious environmental problems such as air pollution and global warming. To combat such problems, the development of clean and renewable energy conversion systems is under high demand.
Light-induced hydrogen generation from water, also known as artificial photosynthesis, is one of the attractive approaches that can directly convert solar energy into fuels. In order to achieve a high conversion efficiency, the development of efficient photocatalysts is critical. The chemical processes leading to a sustainable production of solar hydrogen are highly complex and involve many steps occurring at different time scales. However, the overall process starts with light absorption, followed by ultrafast electron and/or energy transfer. These steps are of key importance as they influence the various subsequent photophysical and photochemical processes.
For the above reasons, my PhD research has focused on understanding of the fundamental early-time (i.e. 10-15 – 10-6 second) photodynamics of a series of ruthenium-based hydrogen generating photocatalysts. The goal of my research was to understand the structure-reactivity relationship, guiding the design of new photocatalysts with improved efficiency.
I used various spectroscopic techniques, including ultrafast transient absorption, time-resolved photoluminescence, time-resolved X-ray absorption, and resonance Raman spectroscopy. In particular our transient absorption setup can generate ultrashort laser pulses, allowing us to explore the fundamental photodynamics with ~100 femtosecond time resolution (1 femtosecond = 10-15 second).
Qing Pan is a PhD student in the Optical Sciences group, directed by Jennifer Herek, and was supervised by Annemarie Huijser.
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Our research is embedded within the EU-COST CM1202 PERSPECT-H2O network. We also collaborate with many research groups with strong expertises in various related fields. During the four years of my research, we have studied more than 14 photocatalysts and related complexes, and the results based on 12 of them are already published in 5 journal papers. Two more articles are currently in preparation, and we are continuing working on a number of related systems.
