title: Phosphorus-doped carbon nitride solid: enhanced electrical conductivity and photocurrent generation.
abstract: As a new kind of polymeric semiconductors, graphitic carbon nitride (g-C(3)N(4)) and its incompletely condensed precursors are stable up to 550 degrees C in air and have shown promising photovoltaic applications. However, for practical applications, their efficiency, limited e.g. by band gap absorption, needs further improvement. Here we report a "structural doping" strategy, in which phosphorus heteroatoms were doped into g-C(3)N(4) via carbon sites by polycondensation of the mixture of the carbon nitride precursors and phosphorus source (specifically from 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ionic liquid). Most of the structural features of g-C(3)N(4) were well retained after doping, but electronic features had been seriously altered, which provided not only a much better electrical (dark) conductivity up to 4 orders of magnitude but also an improvement in photocurrent generation by a factor of up to 5. In addition to being active layers in solar cells, such phosphorus-containing scaffolds and materials are also interesting for polymeric batteries as well as for catalysis and as catalytic supports.
authors.affiliation: International Center for Young Scientists (ICYS), International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), Fuel Cell Materials Center, Photocatalytic Materials Center, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-0044, Japan. ZHANG.Yuanjian@nims.go.jp
authors.forename: Yuanjian
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Toshiyuki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Mori
authors.forename: Jinhua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Antonietti