No abstract

Photoelectrodes with a specific structure and composition have been proposed for improving the efficiency of solar water splitting. Here, a novel multijunction structure was fabricated, with Si nanowires as cores, ZnIn 2 S 4 nanosheets as branches, and TiO 2 films as sandwiched layers. This junction exhibited a superior photoelectrochemical performance with a maximum photoconversion efficiency of 0.51%, which is 795 and 64 times higher than that of a bare Si wafer and nanowires, respectively. The large enhancement was attributed to the effective electron-hole separation and fast excited carrier transport within the multijunctions resulting from their favorable energy band alignments with water redox potentials, and to the enlarged contact area for facilitating the electron transfer at the multijunction/electrolyte interface.

Mn-based oxides Sm(Y, Tb, Gd, Lu)Mn2O5 are synthesized to identify a general descriptor that governs the catalytic performance in NO oxidation.

With systematic first principles calculations, a class of monolayer metal halogenides MX2 (M = Mg, Ca, Zn, Cd, Ge, Pb; M = Cl, Br, I) has been proposed. Our study indicates that these monolayer materials are semiconductors with the band gaps ranging from 2.03 eV of ZnI2 to 6.08 eV of MgCl2. Overall, the band gap increases with the increase of the electronegativity of the X atom or the atomic number of the metal M. Meanwhile, the band gaps of monolayer MgX2 (X = Cl, Br) are direct while those of other monolayers are indirect. Based on the band edge curvatures, the derived electron (me) and hole (mh) effective masses of MX2 monolayers are close to their corresponding bulk values except that the me of CdI2 is three times larger and the mh for PbI2 is twice larger. Finally, the band alignments of all the studied MX2 monolayers are provided using the vacuum level as energy reference. These theoretical results may not only introduce the monolayer metal halogenides family MX2 into the emerging two-dimensional materials, but also provide insights into the applications of MX2 in future electronic, visible and ultraviolet optoelectronic devices.