Energy conversion is at the heart of many natural processes, whether they are converting between chemical, electrical, thermal, or electromagnetic energies, reactions are always the foundation for energy conversion. Catalysis, the essential technology for accelerating and directing reactions, is the key to improve energy conversion efficiency and has been one of the main focus of energy research for decades. As such, most of the commercial energy conversion, especially catalytic, technologies used today are based on the properties of bulk materials developed many years ago. However, it is apparent that these technologies will not meet the world’s increasing energy demands indefinitely. Although nanoscience, and nanotechnology have made impressive progress in recent years, the understanding of energy conversion and catalytic reaction processes at nanoscales is still extremely important. To realize the full potential and improve the efficiency of catalysis for energy conversion, we must develop profound understanding of catalytic reaction and build tools to make real-time, spatially resolved measurements of catalysts at nanoscale.<br/>     The main limitation of traditional electrochemical methods is lack of crucial local information because all the measured electrical properties (current or charges) converge to only one signal from the entire electrode surface. The key fundamental solution is, instead of direct electrical measurement, to measure local current density by optically imaging the local electrochemical reaction products. Using this strategy, we have successfully applied plasmonics-based imaging technique to map the local electrochemical current generated by reaction without scanning at extremely high sensitivity and speed. To further demonstrate the advantage, the electrocatalytic properties of single nanoparticles have been imaged for the first time with plasmonics-based electrochemical imaging technique. These works opened a new research direction which uses optical method to map the electrochemical current and chemical reactions.<br/>

Developing optical imaging techniques to measure the chemical reaction at single nanoparticle level

256th National Meeting (2018)

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