Publication date: 15th December 2014
My talk will focus upon charge carrier dynamics in metal oxide photoelectrodes for water oxidation. I will address the kinetics of charge separation and recombination kinetics and water oxidation. Experimentally, these studies will be based around transient absorption spectroscopy on timescales from femtoseconds to seconds, which will be correlated with the results of photoelectrochemical analyses. These techniques are employed to address the function of hematite, titania and bismuth vandate photoelectrodes, and the effect of deposition of cobalt phosphate on these electrodes. I will focus mainly on the parameters limiting the efficiency of water oxidation on such electrodes. In particular I will present a rate law analysis of water oxidation on oxide electrodes, addressing the dependence of the rate of water oxidation upon the density of surface localized holes. These results will address the extent to which such oxide surface are catalytic for the multi-hole water oxidation reaction, and the implications of this rate law dependence for the mechanism of water oxidation.