Piezo-photocatalysis synergy in γ-GeSe for highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction

Solar-driven semiconductor photocatalysts are highly appealing in applications of environmental remediation and energy conversion. However, photocatalytic reactions, particularly oxygen evolution reaction (OER), are often constrained by the swift recombination of electron–hole pairs, thereby resulting in low reaction efficiency. Although it is effective to separate charge carriers by constructing heterojunctions to form built-in electric field, the lattice mismatch and inefficient interlayer charge transfer of heterojunctions in the photocatalysts limit their further development. Here, we propose a new strategy by constructing an internal electric field for OER through an individual piezoelectric two-dimensional material. The results indicate that the piezoelectric effect regulates the electronic structure, reduces bandgap, improves light absorption efficiency, and that the displacement of positive and negative charge centers is the key factor in the enhanced OER. This research indicates the feasibility of combining piezoelectric properties of two-dimensional materials with OER (1.19 eV), providing new insights and guidance for applying the piezoelectric effect in the OER and opening up a way to promote efficient separation of charge carriers.

Description

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1803128), the Taishan Scholar Project (No. tsqn201909054), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2022JQ22), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities to M.Q. (No. 202341006), and Xinjiang Tianchi Talents Project (No. 2023000043), and computational resources from the Center for High-Performance Computing and System Simulation, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao).

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/26144

Citation

Zhang, T., Zhou, L., Chen, G., Wei, S., Sun, R., Li, Y., Meng, L., Zhang, G., Xia, S., Wang, Z., & Qiu, M. (2024). Piezo-photocatalysis synergy in γ-GeSe for highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction. Journal of Applied Physics, 136. AIP Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0217893