Solar hydrogen production using epitaxial SrTiO[subscript 3]

• Main Authors: Kornblum, L. (Author), Faucher, J. (Author), Han, M. G. (Author), Morales-Acosta, M. D. (Author), Zhu, Y. (Author), Altman, E. I. (Author), Lee, M. L. (Author), Ahn, C. H. (Author), Walker, F. J. (Author), Fenning, David P (Contributor), Boni, Alessandro (Contributor), Shao-Horn, Yang (Contributor), Hwang, Jonathan (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), 2019-01-11T20:52:33Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We demonstrate an oxide-stabilized III-V photoelectrode architecture for solar fuel production from water in neutral pH. For this tunable architecture we demonstrate 100% Faradaic efficiency for hydrogen evolution, and incident photon-to-current efficiencies (IPCE) exceeding 50%. High IPCE for hydrogen evolution is a consequence of the low-loss interface achieved via epitaxial growth of a thin oxide on a GaAs solar cell. Developing optimal energetic alignment across the interfaces of the photoelectrode using well-established III-V technology is key to obtaining high performance. This advance constitutes a critical milestone towards efficient, unassisted fuel production from solar energy.