Energy transfer-enhanced photocatalytic reduction of protons within quantum dot light-harvesting–catalyst assemblies

Significance A feature of natural photosynthetic systems is their ability to operate with the low photon flux of sunlight, where the absorption of light and transport of photochemical potential to the catalytic centers is efficiency-limiting. Natural systems overcome this limitation through a process called energy transfer, where quanta of energy are gathered by many weakly coupled light-absorbing centers that pass the energy among themselves to funnel it to a single catalytic reaction center. Prior to this report, this type of energy migration-based approach to light-powered chemistry has not been employed in artificial photocatalytic systems. This work demonstrates the viability of energy-transfer–based sensitization in colloidal photocatalytic assemblies and provides a framework for its incorporation into scalable solar energy conversion systems.