Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)
Publication date: 6th July 2018
One of the most promising approaches for the development of highly efficient solar water-splitting systems is the use of photoelectrochemical devices consisting of a tandem of photocathode and photoanode. The recently available Si photocathodes with a bandgap of 1.1 eV urge the need for photoanodes with matching electrochemical properties. There are very few suitable semiconductor materials that combine visible light absorption, right kind of band edge energetics and stability in aqueous environments. Thus, a major challenge in bridging the gap to working devices is the development of efficient and stable photoanodes with well-matched characteristics: a bandgap of ~1.8 eV, and photocurrent maximum at potentials as low as ~0.4 V vs. RHE. For this purpose, GaN is a well-known semiconductor material, combining a direct bandgap with band edges straddling the potentials required for water splitting and showing high stability during photoelectrolysis but alas features a large band gap of 3.45 eV, which is too large for the desired application. In order to decrease the bandgap of GaN to 1.5-2.0 eV, Sunkara et al. have experimentally demonstrated that alloying the material with relatively small amounts of Sb (1.5 - 8 at.%) is a promising strategy. In our study we have successfully developed a new metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) process to fabricate Ga(Sbx)N1-x photoanodes. Alloyed thin film photoanodes were deposited on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates and investigated with regard to their structure, morphology and composition by means of XRD, SEM, Raman spectroscopy, RBS/NRA and XPS analyses. The thin films were found to be polycrystalline and by variation of the process parameters it was possible to alloy the photoanode thin films with varied amounts of antimony. Further efforts were made to investigate their photoactivity in water splitting reactions by photoelectrochemical studies, which were conducted on layers deposited on FTO.
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