TY - JOUR T1 - Plasmonic Field Enhancement of the Bacteriorhodopsin Photocurrent during Its Proton Pump Photocycle JF - Journal of the American Chemical Society Y1 - 2010 A1 - Yen, C. W. A1 - Chu, L. K. A1 - El-Sayed, Mostafa A AB - The proton pump photocycle of bacteriorhodopsin (bR) produces photocurrent on a microsecond time scale which is assigned to the deprotonation step forming the M(412) intermediate. The return of the M(412) intermediate to the bR ground state (bR(570)) has two pathways: (1) thermally via multiple intermediates (which takes 15 ms) or (2) by a more rapid and direct process by absorbing blue light (which takes hundreds of nanoseconds). By using nanoparticles (Ag, Ag-Au, and Au NPs) having different surface plasmon resonance extinction spectra, it is found that Ag NPs whose spectrum overlaps best with the M(412) absorption regions enhance the stationary photocurrent 15 times. This large enhancement is proposed to be due to the accelerated photoexcitation rate of the M(412) (in the presence of the plasmon field of the light in this region) as well as short-circuiting of the photocycle, increasing its duty cycles. VL - 132 SN - 0002-7863 N1 - Yen, Chun-Wan Chu, Li-Kang El-Sayed, Mostafa A. M3 - 10.1021/ja101301u ER -