No abstract

Circuit quantization links a physical circuit to its corresponding quantum Hamiltonian. The standard quantization procedure generally assumes any external magnetic flux to be static. Time dependence naturally arises, however, when flux is modulated or when flux noise is considered. In this case, application of the existing quantization procedure can lead to inconsistencies. To resolve these, we generalize circuit quantization to incorporate time-dependent external flux.A. From fluxoid quantization to the time-dependent Hamiltonian: dc SQUID

Photoelectric conversion driven by sunlight has a broad range of energy/environmental applications (e.g., in solar cells and water splitting). However, difficulties are encountered in the separation of photoexcited charges. Here, we realize a long-range (∼1.5 μm period) electric polarization via asymmetric localization of surface plasmons on a three-dimensional silver structure (3D-Ag). This visible-light-responsive effect-the photo-Dember effect, can be analogous to the thermoelectric effect, in which hot carriers are thermally generated instead of being photogenerated. The induced electric field can efficiently separate photogenerated charges, enabling sunlight-driven overall water splitting on a series of dopant-free commercial semiconductor particles (i.e., ZnO, CeO2, TiO2, and WO3) once they are combined with the 3D-Ag substrate. These photocatalytic processes can last over 30 h on 3D-Ag+ZnO, 3D-Ag+CeO2, and 3D-Ag+TiO2, thus demonstrating good catalytic stability for these systems. Using commercial WO3 powder as a reference, the amount of O2 generated with 3D-Ag+CeO2 surpasses even its recently reported counterpart in which sacrificial reagents had to be involved to run half-reactions. This plasmon-mediated charge separation strategy provides an effective way to improve the efficiency of photoelectric energy conversion, which can be useful in photovoltaics and photocatalysis.

Plasmon-generated hot carriers are currently being studied intensively for their role in enhancing the efficiency of photovoltaic and photocatalytic processes. Theoretical studies of the hot electrons subsystem have generated insight, but we show that a unified quantum-mechanical treatment of the plasmon and hot electrons reveals new physical phenomena. Instead of a unidirectional energy transfer process in Landau damping, back energy transfer is predicted in small metal nanoparticles (MNPs) within a model-Hamiltonian approach. As a result, the single Lorentzian plasmonic line shape is modulated by a multipeak structure, whose individual line width provides a direct way to probe the electronic dephasing. More importantly, the hot electron generation can be enhanced greatly by matching the incident energy to the peaks of the modulated line shape.