Hematite nanostructures for high efficient solar water splitting

摘要: Hematite has emerged as a good photocatalyst for efficient solar water splitting due to its favorable optical band gap (2.1–2.2 eV), extraordinary chemical stability in oxidative environment, abundance, and low cost. According theoretical prediction, the solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of hematite can be 16.8% photocurrent 12.6 mA cm−2. However, practical performance is far from ideal case which been limited by several factors such poor conductivity, short lifetime excited-state carrier (10−12s), oxygen evolution reaction (OER) kinetics, hole diffusion length (2–4nm), improper position unassisted splitting. In our recent work, enormous efforts have focused on improving nanostructure photoelectrode. Different methods morphology control, elemental doping, improvement charge transport developed improve photoelectrode