New Advances in Solar-Driven Reactions for Green Energy Production

Dear Colleagues,

In these days, one of the most significant challenges that our world is facing is the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy resources to limit drastic climate changes due to greenhouse gas emissions. Solar light is a promising candidate to overcome this issue since it is the cleanest, (practically) inexhaustible, and most distributed energy source that we can mainly exploit in two ways: solar-driven electricity generation or conversion into chemical fuels. The latter approach addresses both energy conversion and storage, by mimicking the natural photosynthesis, characterized by very efficient mechanisms of photoelectrons funneling to the reaction center, where the solar-to-chemical energy conversion takes place.

Light harvesting and multielectron chemistry are two crucial pillars in natural photosynthetic systems, properties that need to be transferred into advanced artificial materials. New (hybrid) heterostructured nanocrystals are attracting huge interest in this field, thanks to their versatility and their ability to be actively involved in the photon absorption process, in the migration and charge separation of the photoexcited carriers, and in the catalytic surface reactions. One of the main advantages of these nanostructured materials is the possibility of tuning their electronic and structural properties through synthesis design, which allows enhancing the catalytic activities occurring at the interfaces between reactants substrate, catalyst, and sensitizer of the “solar-to-chemical” converter device, and to minimize energy losses due to multiple factors, as electron-hole recombination or corrosion/degradation of the components. In this context, the realization of complex architectures composed of new nanomaterials, as well as the understanding of the fundamental photochemistry and photophysics driving the energy transfer are pivotal steps toward the definition of a winning strategy to optimize the performance operation of solar-powered devices.

This Special issue invites research papers, reviews and perspectives dealing with:

• New nanomaterials (nanocrystal semiconductors, metals, and their hybrids) and new nanoarchitectures (self-assembly, z-scheme, hybrid materials) for solar-to-chemical energy conversion;
• New light-harvesting nanomaterials (organic and inorganic);
• Fundamental understanding of energy transfer in photosynthetic and photocatalytic processes;
• Solar-driven synthesis of organic compounds.

Dr. Francesca Stefania Freyria
Dr. Sandra Doria
Guest Editors

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• semiconductor nanocrystals
• solar to fuel conversion
• artificial photosynthesis
• light harvesting
• enhancement of catalytic activity
• green energy production