Spontaneous photoelectric field-enhancement effect prompts the low cost hierarchical growth of highly ordered heteronanostructures for solar water splitting
International Research Center for Renewable Energy, State Key Laboratory for Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, School of Energy & Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China
Abstract:
In this study, a potentially universal new strategy is reported for the large-scale, low-cost fabrication of visible-light-active highly ordered heteronanostructures based on the spontaneous photoelectric-field-enhancement effect inherent in pyramidal morphology. The hierarchical vertically oriented arrayed structures comprise an active molecular co-catalyst at the apex of a visible-light-active large band gap semiconductor for low-cost solar water splitting in a neutral aqueous medium without the use of a sacrificial agent.
