Housed within a plant’s leaves is a chemical factory of sorts that absorbs energy from the sun and uses it to produce chemicals. The elegant and clean machinery has inspired research groups around the world — each aspiring to develop synthetic devices that mimic nature’s photosynthesis capability.
Many scientists are trying to mimic one of the two photosynthesis steps — water splitting or carbon dioxide (CO2) fixation. The water-splitting step takes energy directly from the sun and uses it to decompose water into oxygen, hydrogen, and electrons, while the CO2 fixation step uses the electrons produced in the first step to convert CO2 into carbon monoxide (CO).
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), chemistry professor Daniel Nocera and his team have developed a device that does both the water-splitting and the carbon fixation to produce higher-value chemicals. The part-synthetic, part-biologic system consists of a two-electrode water-splitter...
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