Seedless Growth of Nanowires and Selective Positioning of Quantum Dots for Flexible and Panchromatic Photoelectrochemical Cells

该基金提供资金用于开发透明导电氧化物纳米线的无籽生长和多种半导体纳米粒子选择性涂层纳米线的新型加工技术。我们将探索氧化层上纳米线非均质成核的机制。控制氧化层的组成和厚度，有利于氧化纳米线的成核和生长。在纳米线的表面上，半导体纳米粒子将通过改进的电沉积工艺被选择性地定位。不同半导体纳米颗粒层的位置取决于它们的光吸收光谱。吸收波长较长的光的纳米粒子将被放置在纳米线的底部，以收集所有的可见光光谱。这些混合纳米线阵列将使用电学、光学和化学方法进行表征。如果成功，这项研究的预期结果将导致无机复合材料阵列，它将收集入射太阳光的所有可见成分。多层半导体纳米颗粒阵列将使复合阵列的光吸收光谱比现有的半导体材料宽得多。此外，所提出的研究将提供对各种表面和界面的载流子损耗机制的全面理解，以获得更好的电子传导。全色光吸收能力和快速载流子传输的结合将有助于制造高性能光电化学电池。该研究的更广泛的影响在于它有潜力提供高效的能量转换和存储设备，使用低成本和连续的制造过程。这将使我们更接近于实现为医疗保健和环境监测等许多应用开发完全集成的复杂混合灵活电子系统的目标。

he grant provides funding to develop novel processing techniques for seedless growth of transparent conducting oxide nanowires and selective coating of nanowires with multiple kinds of semiconductor nanoparticles. We will probe to uncover the mechanism responsible for the heterogeneous nucleation of the nanowires on the oxide layer. The composition and thickness of the thin oxide layer will be controlled to facilitate the nucleation and growth of the oxide nanowires. On the surface of the nanowires, semiconductor nanoparticles will be selectively positioned by a modified electrodeposition process. The location of different semiconductor nanoparticle layers will be determined by their light absorption spectrum. Nanoparticles absorbing the light with longer wavelength will be placed to be close to the bottom of the nanowires to harvest all of visible light spectrum. These hybrid nanowire arrays will be characterized using electrical, optical, and chemical methods.If successful, the expected outcomes of this research will lead to inorganic composite arrays that will harvest all visible components of incoming solar light. Multilayer semiconductor nanoparticle arrays will make the light absorption spectrum of the composite arrays much broader than that of current semiconductor materials. Moreover, the proposed research will deliver a comprehensive understanding of carrier loss mechanisms at various surfaces and interfaces for better electronic conduction. A combination of panchromatic light absorption capability and fast carrier transport will contribute to manufacturing high performance photoelectrochemical cells. The broader impact of the research lies in its potential to provide the highly efficient energy conversion and storage devices using a low cost and continuous manufacturing process. This will take us one step closer toward realizing the development of fully integrated complex hybrid, flexible electronic systems for many applications such as healthcare and environmental monitoring.