TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zamponi, Flavio
A1  - Penfold, Thomas J.
A1  - Nachtegaal, Maarten
A1  - Luebcke, Andrea
A1  - Rittmann, Jochen
A1  - Milne, Chris J.
A1  - Chergui, Majed
A1  - van Bokhoven, Jeroen A.
T1  - Probing the dynamics of plasmon-excited hexanethiol-capped gold nanoparticles by picosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy
JF  - Physical chemistry, chemical physics : a journal of European Chemical Societies
N2  - Picosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is used to investigate the electronic and structural dynamics initiated by plasmon excitation of 1.8 nm diameter Au nanoparticles (NPs) functionalised with 1-hexanethiol. We show that 100 ps after photoexcitation the transient XAS spectrum is consistent with an 8% expansion of the Au-Au bond length and a large increase in disorder associated with melting of the NPs. Recovery of the ground state occurs with a time constant of similar to 1.8 ns, arising from thermalisation with the environment. Simulations reveal that the transient spectrum exhibits no signature of charge separation at 100 ps and allows us to estimate an upper limit for the quantum yield (QY) of this process to be <0.1.
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cp03301a
SN  - 1463-9076
SN  - 1463-9084
VL  - 16
IS  - 42
SP  - 23157
EP  - 23163
PB  - Royal Society of Chemistry
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -