Proceedings of nanoGe September Meeting 2017 (NFM17)
Publication date: 20th June 2016
Photocatalysis with visible light is of broad interest as it allows to use sunlight for the production of hydrogen and to destroy harmful chemicals in a photochemical process.
In recent years BiVO4 has proven to be an excellent candidate for water oxidation, especially in a photoelectrochemical cell (PEC) setup. The most important advantage with respect to TiO2 is that BiVO4 has a narrow bandgap (2.4 eV) sensitive for visible light. Additionally, BiVO4 is made from low cost nontoxic materials and has a good stability during solar energy conversion. However, BiVO4 has a few inherent limits, where slow oxygen evolution kinetics and inefficient charge carrier separation are the most important.
These problems may be solved by creating BiVO4 based heterostructures as p-n junctions enhance charge carrier separation and cocatalysts improve the oxygen evolution kinetics. However, it is in general difficult to deconvolute the different effects any additional material may have on the photocatalyst performance.
In our ongoing research we try to specifically investigate how space charge layers at the BiVO4 interface affect the performance when a hetero structure is created. For this purpose we use PES (XPS, UPS) to analyze the junction of an in-situ formed heterointerface between a clean BiVO4 thin film substrate and an overlayer stepwise deposited by magnetron sputtering. From the core level binding energy shifts of BiVO4 and overlayer, band bending at the interface can be evaluated. These band bending values were then combined with UPS spectra and XPS valence band spectra to assess the band alignment at the heterointerface. So far, we have investigated how the oxidation cocatalysts RuO2, NiO and Co3O4 align with BiVO4.
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