Engineering Silicon Nanowires to Convert Sunlight into Electricity electricty silicon nanowires engineering
Researchers initially illustrated that liquid water could be split into oxygen and hydrogen gas using electricity generated by illuminating a semiconductor electrode five decades ago. Although solar-powered hydrogen is an encouraging form of clean energy, low efficiencies, and high costs have hampered the commercialization of solar-powered hydrogen plants.
James Cahoon, Ph.D., Hyde Family Foundation Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, and his colleagues have been working on the chemical synthesis of semiconductor nanomaterials with unique physical properties that can facilitate a variety of technologies ranging from solar cells to solid-state memory. Cahoon is the corresponding author of the study, which was published in Nature on February 9th, 2023.
Silicon is capable of absorbing both visible and infrared light. Because of this and other properties, such as its abundance, low toxicity, and stability, it has historically been an ultimate candidate for solar cells, also known as photovoltaic cells and semiconductors. We used this approach to create a new class of water-splitting multijunction nanoparticles. These combine the material and economic advantages of silicon with the photonic advantages of nanowires that have a diameter smaller than the wavelength of absorbed light. Owing to the inherent asymmetry of the wire junctions, we were able to use a light-driven electrochemical method to deposit the co-catalysts selectively onto the ends of the wires to enable water splitting.
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