Plasmonic Nanocavities Enable Self‐Induced Electrostatic Catalysis

The potential of strong interactions between light and matter remains to be further explored within a chemical context. Towards this end herein we study the electromagnetic interaction between molecules and plasmonic nanocavities. By means of electronic structure calculations, we show that self‐induced catalysis emerges without any external stimuli through the interaction of the molecular permanent and fluctuating dipole moments with the plasmonic cavity modes. We also exploit this scheme to modify the transition temperature T_1/2 of spin‐crossover complexes as an example of how strong light–matter interactions can ultimately be used to control a materials responses.     

Robust Synthesis of Gold-Based Multishell Structures as Plasmonic Catalysts for Selective Hydrogenation of 4-Nitrostyrene

A robust self-template strategy is used for facile and large-scale synthesis of porous multishell gold with controllable shell number, sphere size, and in situ surface modification. The process involved the rapid reduction of novel Au-melamine colloidal templates with a great amount of NaBH₄ in presence of poly(sodium-p-styrenesulfonate) (PSS). After soaking the templates in other metal salt solution, the obtained bimetallic templates could also be generally converted into bimetallic multishell structures by same reduction process. In the hydrogenation of 4-nitrostyrene using NH₃BH₃ as a reducing agent, the porous triple-shell Au with surface modification (S-PTSAu) exhibited excellent selectivity (97 %) for 4-aminostyrene in contrast with unmodified triple-shell Au. Furthermore, it also showed higher enhancement of catalytic activity under irradiation of visible light as compared to similar catalysts with fewer shells.