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

他资助开发新的加工技术，用于透明导电氧化物纳米线的无籽生长和用多种半导体纳米颗粒选择性地覆盖纳米线。我们将探索揭示导致纳米线在氧化层上异质成核的机制。薄氧化层的成分和厚度将被控制，以促进氧化物纳米线的成核和生长。半导体纳米粒子将通过改进的电沉积过程选择性地定位在纳米线的表面。不同的半导体纳米粒子层的位置将由其光吸收光谱来确定。吸收波长较长的光的纳米颗粒将被放置在靠近纳米线底部的位置，以获取所有的可见光光谱。这些混合纳米线阵列将用电、光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阵列，它将收集进入的太阳光的所有可见成分。多层半导体纳米粒子阵列将使复合阵列的光吸收光谱比目前半导体材料的吸收光谱宽得多。此外，拟议的研究将全面了解各种表面和界面上的载流子损失机制，以实现更好的电子传导。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的光电化学电池。这项研究的更广泛的影响在于它有可能提供使用低成本和连续制造工艺的高效能量转换和存储设备。这将使我们离实现完全集成的复杂、混合、灵活的电子系统的开发又近了一步，这些系统适用于医疗保健和环境监测等许多应用。

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.