Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)
Publication date: 6th July 2018
Due to worldwide growing industry nations, the need of energy has been drastically increased within the last decades. In order to save our environment and decrease global warming, the development of new renewable energy systems is essential. Here, natural photosynthesis acts as the model, which is the most important and basic method of converting and storing sun energy. One emerging technology to achieve a solar to fuel conversion is a photoelectric catalytic cell, which is able to convert CO2 directly into fuels. The first essential part of such a device is the photoabsorber, which has to drive the electrochemical reaction. In our model system a (100) p-Si | n+-Si junction serves as photoabsorber material. Thereby, different surface terminations were prepared: hydrogen capped as well as native and thermally grown SiO2 as passivating interlayers. The second important part of the direct photoelectrochemical device is an appropriate catalyst which allows high current densities at low overpotentials when being in contact with a suitable electrolyte. As metallic Cu is known to be able to reduce CO2 to CH4, C2H4 and alcohols in aqueous electrolytes, electron beam deposited metallic Cu is used as catalyst in our model system. For the purpose of understanding the electrochemical performance of such a direct photoelectrochemical device, it is necessary to analyze the electronic structure of the interface between its two main components- the Si junction as photoabsorber and the Cu thin film as catalyst. Therefore, the interface was investigated by in-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis after the stepwise deposition of Cu onto the (100) p-Si | n+-Si surface with different surface terminations. Furthermore, cyclic voltammetry (CV) was used to determine the electrochemical (EC) performance in an aqueous 0.3 M KHCO3 electrolyte solution. The aim of this work is to achieve a basic understanding on how the different band alignments due to different surface terminations impact the CO2 reduction reaction.
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