Fabrication and excitation transfer investigation of chalcopyrite nanocrystals-gold nanoparticle hybrid structures

Abstract

2025Hybrid structures composed of chalcopyrite nanocrystals embedded into the lipid coating of noble metal nanoparticles show significant potential for advancing applications in plasmon-enhanced photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, and solar cell technologies. While previous works have studied chalcopyrite’s quasistatic resonance in the visible region with silver nanoparticles, gold-based hybrid structures remain underexplored. This work optimized the fabrication of gold-based hybrid structures and investigated the excitation transfer between the two components via single-particle spectroscopy and simulations. The energetic mismatch with the gold plasmon (~550 nm) overlapping with the low-energy tail of the chalcopyrite’s quasistatic resonance (460–510 nm) seems to make gold nanoparticles less suited to engineer excitation transfer than silver nanoparticles, whose plasmon (~450 nm) shows better overlap with the chalcopyrite quasistatic resonance. These findings decisively enhance our understanding of the energetic interactions between plasmonic metal and “semiconductor” nanostructures that sustain collective quasistatic resonances in bi-resonant hybrid structures