Interfacial Engineering for Efficient Solar Water Splitting

With climate change seriously endangering our environment, security and health, the expected shortening in fossil fuels and sharp increase in energy demand from emerging countries, a substantial worldwide renewed interest in the field of materials for solar energy conversion has occurred within the last few years. However the high cost of energy production and relatively low efficiency of currently used systems pose an intrinsic limitation. (R)evolutionary materials development is required to achieve the necessary dramatic increases in power generation and conversion efficiency and so at low cost and large scale.

A general strategy for the modeling, design and fabrication of low cost metal oxide heteronanostructures consisting of quantum dots and oriented quantum rods-based large bandgap semiconductor structures and devices by low cost aqueous chemical growth will be demonstrated.

Synchrotron-based x-ray spectroscopies studies along with DFT calculation have been carried out to probe and engineer the interfacial electronic structure, confinement effects and orbital character and symmetry of the band edges and bandgaps as well as surface chemistry of advanced oxide heteronanostructures. The results reveal important fundamental and applied knowledge of direct relevance for semiconductor technologies such as photovoltaics and photocatalysis. Structure-property relationships as well as efficiency optimization of novel low cost nanodevices based on quantum-confined metal oxide nanostructures and heterostructures for renewable hydrogen generation from seawater splitting as well as other devices will be presented.