Construction of Gold/Rhodium Freestanding Superstructures as Antenna-Reactor Photocatalysts for Plasmon-Driven Nitrogen Fixation

Precisely controlling the architecture and spatial arrangement of plasmonic heterostructures offers unique opportunities to tailor the catalytic property, whereas the lack of a wet-chemistry synthetic approach to fabricating nanostructures with high-index facets limits their practical applications. Herein, we describe a universal synthetic strategy to construct Au/Rh freestanding superstructures (SSs) through the selective growth of ordered Rh nanoarrays on high-index-faceted Au nanobipyramids (NBPs). This synthetic strategy works on various metal nanocrystal substrates and can yield diverse Au/Rh and Pd/Rh SSs. Especially, the obtained Au NBP/Rh SSs exhibit high photocatalytic activity toward N2 fixation as a result of the spatially separated architecture, local electric field enhancement, and the antenna-reactor mechanism. Both theoretical and experimental results reveal that the Au NBPs can function as nanoantennas for light-harvesting to generate hot charge carriers for driving N2 fixation, while the Rh nanoarrays can serve as the active sites for N2 adsorption and activation to synergistically promote the overall catalytic activity in the Au NBP/Rh SSs. This work offers new avenues to rationally designing and constructing spatially separated plasmonic photocatalysts for high-efficiency catalytic applications.