title: Fabrication of porous TiO2 nanorod array photoelectrodes with enhanced photoelectrochemical water splitting by helium ion implantation.
abstract: Porous photoelectrodes show high efficiency in hydrogen production by water splitting. However, fabrication of porous nanorods is usually difficult. Here, we report a simple approach to fabricate a kind of novel porous rutile titanium dioxide nanorod array by an advanced ion implantation method using multiple-energy helium ion implantation and subsequent annealing. The porous nanostructure enhances the photoelectrochemical performance of the titanium dioxide nanorod array photoelectrodes under Uv-visible light illumination, where the highest photocurrent density was relatively about 10 times higher than that of the pristine titanium dioxide nanorod array. The formation of nanocavities mainly contributes to the enhancement of the photocurrent density by trapping holes inside to separate the charge carriers. The study demonstrates that ion implantation could be an effective approach to develop novel porous nanostructural photoelectrodes for the application of hydrogen production.
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yichao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: International Research Centre for Renewable Energy and State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Shanxi 710049, China.
authors.forename: Shaohua
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: International Research Centre for Renewable Energy and State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Shanxi 710049, China.
authors.forename: Jianan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: International Research Centre for Renewable Energy and State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Shanxi 710049, China.
authors.forename: Yanming
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Xudong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Guangxu
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zhuo
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xing
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hengyi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Technology, Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. fren@whu.edu.cn czjiang@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Changzhong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Jiang