Facilitating excited-state plasmonics and photochemical reaction dynamics

Continuously advancing technologies is crucial to tackling modern challenges such as efficient energy transfer, directing catalytic behavior, and better understanding of microscopic phenomena. At the heart of many of these problems is nanoscale chemistry. In previous decades, the scientific community has made significant progress in nanoscale structures and technologies, especially relating to their interactions with light. Plasmonic nanostructures have been extensively studied over the past decades because of their fascinating properties and vast technological applications. They can confine light into intense local electromagnetic fields, which has been exploited in the fields of spectroscopy, energy harvesting, optoelectronics, chemical sensing, and biomedicine. Recently, however, plasmonic nanostructures have shown great potential to trigger chemical transformations of proximal molecular species via hot carrier and thermally driven processes. In this review, we discuss the basic concepts governing nanoscale light-matter interactions, the immediate phenomena induced by them, and how we can use nanoscale light-matter interactions to our advantage with surface-enhanced spectroscopy techniques and chemical reactions in confined plasmonic environments.