Localized Dielectric Breakdown and Antireflection Coating in Metal-oxide-semiconductor Photoelectrodes

Overview

Journal Nat Mater

Date 2016 Nov 8

PMID 27820811

Citations 7

Authors

Li Ji

Hsien-Yi Hsu

Xiaohan Li

Kai Huang

Ye Zhang

Jack C Lee

Allen J Bard

Edward T Yu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Silicon-based photoelectrodes for solar fuel production have attracted great interest over the past decade, with the major challenge being silicon's vulnerability to corrosion. A metal-insulator-semiconductor architecture, in which an insulator film serves as a protection layer, can prevent corrosion but must also allow low-resistance carrier transport, generally leading to a trade-off between stability and efficiency. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a general method to decouple the two roles of the insulator by employing localized dielectric breakdown. This approach allows the insulator to be thick, which enhances stability, while enabling low-resistance carrier transport as required for efficiency. This method can be applied to various oxides, such as SiO and AlO. In addition, it is suitable for silicon, III-V compounds, and other optical absorbers for both photocathodes and photoanodes. Finally, the thick metal-oxide layer can serve as a thin-film antireflection coating, which increases light absorption efficiency.

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