In his recent talk, Prof. Jacinto Sá gave us insight into the research on photovoltaic and photocatalytic plasmonic materials and he took us on a journey from fundamental studies to transparent solar cells in application, made out of plasmonic silver nano particles. The audience was guided trough the stepstones that needed to be mastered to understand and improve the charge transport in plasmonic materials. A further unusual characteristic of plasmonic materials was a photon to current efficiency from above hundret percent, which is possible due to multiple charge generations by a single absorption process. Since plamonics do not have a band gap, the potential can be tuned by choosing the electron and the hole collector. In the following discussion, the problematic extraction of plasmonic nanopartikels, the market niche of transparent solar sells and the background of collaborators were adressed.

The talk took place at the 16th of September 2021 and was part of the interdisciplinary lecture series "Chemistry meets Physics" - a cooperation between the JCF Oldenburg and the jDPG Oldenburg.