Well–Steered Charge–Carrier Transfer in 3D Branched CuxO/ZnO@Au Heterostructures for Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution

Multi-component hetero-nanostructures exhibit multifunctional properties or synergistic performance and are thus considered as attractive materials for energy conversion applications. There is a long-standing demand to construct more sophisticated heterostructures for steering charge-carrier flow in...

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Published inACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 7; no. 48; pp. 26819 - 26827
Main Authors Zhou, Gang, Xu, Xiaoyong, Ding, Tao, Feng, Bing, Bao, Zhijia, Hu, Jingguo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States American Chemical Society 09.12.2015
Subjects
CuO/ZnO@Au
photogenerated carrier transfer
plasmonic photocatalyst
branched heterostructure
photocatalytic hydrogen production
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Summary:Multi-component hetero-nanostructures exhibit multifunctional properties or synergistic performance and are thus considered as attractive materials for energy conversion applications. There is a long-standing demand to construct more sophisticated heterostructures for steering charge-carrier flow in semiconductor systems. Herein we fabricate a large-scale quantity of three-dimensional (3D) branched Cu x O/ZnO@Au heterostructure consisting of CuO nanowires (NWs) and grafted ZnO nanodisks (NDs) decorated with Au nanoparticles via sequential hierarchical assemblies. This treelike hetero-nanostructure ensures well-steered transfer of photogenerated electrons to the exposed ZnO NDs, while holes to the CuO backbone NWs with concerted efforts from multi-node p–n junctions, polar ZnO facets, and Au plasmon, resulting in the significantly enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance.
ISSN:1944-8244
1944-8252
DOI:10.1021/acsami.5b09027