Contributed
Plasmonic photo-catalysis - “hot electrons” or just heating?

In recent year there have been claims that "hot-electrons" in illuminated plasonic nano-structures were responsible for the catalysis of various reactions. Here we will argue that this is not the case, and in fact what was attributed to hot electrons is a simple thermal effect. We motivate our claims with basic theoretical arguments, and demostrate it using available experimental data from the literature, which shows remarkable agreement to a thermal theory (with essentially no fitting parameters).