title: A composite CdS thin film/TiO2 nanotube structure by ultrafast successive electrochemical deposition toward photovoltaic application.
abstract: Fabricating functional compounds on substrates with complicated morphology has been an important topic in material science and technology, which remains a challenging issue to simultaneously achieve a high growth rate for a complex nanostructure with simple controlling factors. Here, we present a novel simple and successive method based on chemical reactions in an open reaction system manipulated by an electric field. A uniform CdS/TiO2 composite tubular structure has been fabricated in highly ordered TiO2 nanotube arrays in a very short time period (~90 s) under room temperature (RT). The content of CdS in the resultant and its crystalline structure was tuned by the form and magnitude of external voltage. The as-formed structure has shown a quite broad and bulk-like light absorption spectrum with the absorption of photon energy even below that of the bulk CdS. The as-fabricated-sensitized solar cell based on this composite structure has achieved an efficiency of 1.43% without any chemical doping or co-sensitizing, 210% higher than quantum dot-sensitized solar cell (QDSSC) under a similar condition. Hopefully, this method can also easily grow nanostructures based on a wide range of compound materials for energy science and electronic technologies, especially for fast-deploying devices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dong Chuan Road, Shanghai 200240, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Han
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dong Chuan Road, Shanghai 200240, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dong Chuan Road, Shanghai 200240, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Wenzhong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shen
keywords: CdS thin film; Composite tubular structure; Solar cell; Successive electrochemical deposition; TiO2 nanotube; Ultrafast