Hybrid Plasmonic Nanostructures: Environmental Impact and Applications

1. Introduction

Recently, population growth and fast urbanization and industrialization have been increased dramatically. Therefore, several serious environmental issues such as; climate changes, global warming and pollution of water resources were still a main challenge for the whole world. These issues may become even worse if no efficient/sustainable solutions has been developed to reduce their reasons.(Li et al. (2015)) Due to these tremendous advances, the search for the suitable platforms, and materials to be used in wide-variety of environmental applications became the main target for several research groups.

Plasmonic materials and their hybrid nanostructures have unique and intriguing physico-chemical and biological properties compared to their bulk counterparts. This is attributed to their high surface-to-volume ratio, shape and size dependent optical properties and their localized surface Plasmon.(Li et al. (2001), Sharma et al. (2008), Iglesias-Silva et al. (2007), Huang and Yang (2008) and El-Nour et al. (2010)) Additionally, the ease of surface modification functionalization to be utilized in different applications.(Qu et al. (2013), Cuenya (2010), and Zhang et al. (2010)) Therefore, plasmonic nanomaterials and their hybrid nanocomposites represent new class of materials which could be good candidates to provide promising solutions for the most environmental issues.(Guo and Wang (2011), Cao et al. (2013), and Corma and Serna (2006)) These possible applications can varies either from their catalytic and photocatalytic applications, light harvesting, sensing, and antimicrobial applications (Figure 1). (Li et al. (2015))

Figure 1.

Schematic illustration of the possible applications od plasmonic nanoparticles in the environmental field. Reproduced from[Li, J., Zhao, T., Chen, T., Liu, Y., Ong, C.N. and Xie, J., 2015. Engineering noble metal nanomaterials for environmental applications. Nanoscale, 7(17), pp.7502-7519] Published by The Royal Society of Chemistry