New article on '"Optoprotonics" - Control of proton transport by light' published in Nature Communications

13.11.2020

Photobases are molecules or molecular moieties that have higher proton affinity in the excited state than in the ground state. In our paper published in Nature Communications we report that photobases increase the efficiency of photocatalytic hydrogen production on carbon dots. The rate of this reaction is often limited by proton transport to the active sites. Photobases help by pulling the protons towards the sites exactly when the protons are needed. This way we show that in photocatalytic processes light not only provides the energy to produce hydrogen from water, but can also control the kinetics of proton transport.

Photobase Effect for Just-in-time Delivery in Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation by J. Fang, T. Debnath, S. Bhattacharyya, M. Döblinger, J. Feldmann, and J. K. Stolarczyk