Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

This symposium focuses on all aspects relating to the use of nanomaterials as photocatalysts and photosensitizers, including the synthesis, structural and functional characterization, modelling, and application. Nanomaterials offer two crucial properties: a large surface-to-volume ratio and size-dependent light matter interactions, which motivate the exploration of this field in order to solve the urgent problems of our time, energy production and storage, as well as carbon-neutral production of chemicals.

The aim and purpose of this symposium is to bring together the community that develops the next generation of nanomaterials-based catalysis and will identify mechanisms, bottlenecks and potentials that drive this important field forward. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, solar fuel production, water purification, or light-induced transformations of organic molecules, interfaces and heterojunctions, excited state dynamics, non-linear optics, and plasmonic enhancement. We hope to cover a broad range of factors and methodologies that are crucial for the field and constitute a universal and multi-faceted approach, including structural characterization with atomic resolution, state-of-the-art spectroscopic and electrochemical methods, evaluation of actual photocatalytic activity, and theoretical calculations of the catalytic processes and size-dependent effects. We therefore encourage everybody working in this field to submit an abstract and participate in the symposium.

Topics will include:

• Nanoscale photocatalyst synthesis
• Advanced methodologies for structural characterization down to atomic resolution
• Excited state dynamics in nanocrystal photocatalysts: time-resolved spectroscopy, (spectro-)electrochemistry
• Operando studies of photocatalytic systems
• Quantum mechanical treatment of nanocrystal surfaces, electronic states, or catalytic processes
• Plasmon-enhanced photocatalysis
• Bio-hybrid and bio-inspired photocatalytic systems
• Novel applications and devices

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Nadja Bigall (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
• Maytal Caspary Toroker (Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Kazunari Domen (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Gordana Dukovic (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
• Robert Godin (The University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Naomi Halas (Rice University, USA)
• Prashant Jain (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Christine Kranz (Universität Ulm, Germany)
• Masaru Kuno (University of Notre Dame, USA)
• Greta Patzke (University of Zürich, Switzerland)
• Peng Zeng (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China)
• Haimei Zheng (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
• Ziyi Zhong (Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology, China)

Symposium Organizers