Host: The Japan Society of Vacuum and Surface Science
In recent research, there have been some attempts to use semiconductors to control catalytic reactions. Photocatalysts could accelerate chemical reactions using the recombination of excited electrons and holes, however, available energy is restricted in semiconductor band gap energy. To achieve chemical reactions with much higher activation energy, we propose another type of electronic excitation: hot carriers leading to chemical reactions. This idea has been demonstrated as desorption by hot carriers from a MOS structure in electronic circuits. When a gate voltage VG is applied to the metal electrode in MOS, hot carriers tunnel or ballistically move from the substrate through the insulating thin oxide layer and injected into the surface metal layer, which would induce dissociation, association, and desorption reactions of adsorbed molecules on the metal surface. We are challenging dissociation and association processes using a Pd thin film on Si-MOS (Pd/SiO2/Si), like CO + 1/2 O2 → CO2↑ reaction by applying gate voltages. We will report the detailed results in this presentation.
