PAIDEIA focuses on two main advantages aiming to enhance the capacity of solar energy conversion: i) plasmon assisted hot carriers extraction from NIR plasmonic materials; ii) linewidth narrowing in plasmonic nanoparticle films that enhances the lifetime of hot carriers and, thus, boosts the efficiency of light driven carrier extraction. Instead of metals, which operate mostly in the visible region, we will make use of doped semiconductor nanocrystals (DSNCs) as hot electron extraction materials possessing a plasmonic response tunable in the range 800 nm – 4000 nm.
