All results presented in this thesis were obtained during my Ph.D. studies in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alberta, under supervision of Professor Karthik Shankar. The thesis starts with an introductory chapter that asserts the importance of the development of light-harvesting technologies and plasmonic materials. Chapter 2 of this dissertation is about the methodology and the experimental setup including chemicals and materials used for the synthesis and running the

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... experiments, experimental procedure for the CO2 photoreduction, water-splitting and hydrogen evolution. Chapter 3 has been published as an article titled, "Asymmetric Multipole Plasmon-Mediated Catalysis Shifts the Product Selectivity of CO2 Photoreduction toward C2+ Products" in the journal of Applied Materials and Interfaces. I have designed and performed the measurements and wrote the manuscript for this study, and Sheng Zeng helped me with CO2 photoreduction reaction experiments. Ajay Manuel helped me with the finite difference timedomain (FDTD) simulations. Saralyn Riddell, Dr. Pawan Kumar, and Dr. Kazi Alam helped me with the sample characterizations and data collection. Results presented in chapter 4 are related to a full-fledged article titled "Au-amorphous TiO2 heterojunction: Plasmon coupled ultrathin hot carrier photoanode and photocathode for high-performance photoelectrochemical water-splitting." This article is going to be submitted to a journal soon. In this study, I have synthesized the samples and conducted the experiments. Sheng Zeng, Dr. Kazi Alam, Dr. Pawan Kumar, and Saralyn Riddell helped me with sample characterization and data collection. The results of chapter 5 are related to a written article titled "Sponge shaped Au nanoparticles: A practical stand-alone photocatalyst for driving light-induced CO2 reduction reaction via interband v transition" in the study, I have devised the experiments, fabricated, and characterized the samples and Saralyn Riddell helped me with sample fabrication. This article is ready to be submitted as a communication to a journal. Finally, the last chapter of this dissertation is dedicated to the conclusions and the future works. vi