Judicious interfacial-, crystalline- and structural-engineering of plasmonic metal-semiconductor nanocomposites is key to harnessing their plasmonic functions for enhancing solar energy conversion. In this work, [email protected] core-shell nanocrystals with atomically organized interface, quasi-monocrystalline shell and diverse controllable structures/morphologies, which are hardly tractable by conventional synthetic strategies, are accessed by developing an aqueous cation exchange method. The combined studies including Mid-IR femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy measurements show that the superior metal-semiconductor interface attained by the presented method can greatly promote the extraction of hot electrons from metal to semiconductor (the quantum yield of hot electron injection was estimated at ~ 48%) in comparison with the nanostructures bearing unoptimized interfaces. Thus produced [email protected] nanocrystals give 2–3 orders of magnitude enhancement in photocatalytic H₂ evolution activity relative to their counterparts accessed by conventional methods.

等离子体金属半导体纳米复合材料的界面，晶体和结构工程的明智选择是利用其等离子体功能来增强太阳能转化的关键。在这项工作中，通过开发一种水性阳离子交换方法，可以得到具有原子组织界面，准单晶壳和多种可控结构/形态的[电子邮件保护]核壳纳米晶体，这些晶体难以通过常规合成策略处理。包括中红外飞秒瞬态吸收光谱测量在内的综合研究表明，通过本方法获得的优越的金属-半导体界面可以极大地促进热电子从金属向半导体的提取（热电子注入的量子产率估计为〜48与带有未优化界面的纳米结构相比。如此生产的[受电子邮件保护的]纳米晶体在光催化H方面提高了2-3个数量级。₂进化活动相对于通过常规方法获得的进化活动。