Localized dielectric breakdown and antireflection coating in metal-oxide-semiconductor photoelectrodes.
Silicon-based photoelectrodes for solar fuel production have attracted great interest over the past decade, with the major challenge being silicon's vulnerability to corrosion. A metal-insulator-semiconductor architecture, in which an insulator film serves as a protection layer, can prevent corrosion but must also allow low-resistance carrier transport, generally leading to a trade-off between stability and efficiency. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a general method to decouple the two roles of the insulator by employing localized dielectric breakdown. This approach allows the insulator to be thick, which enhances stability, while enabling low-resistance carrier transport as required for efficiency. This method can be applied to various oxides, such as SiO2and Al2O3. In addition, it is suitable for silicon, III-V compounds, and other optical absorbers for both photocathodes and photoanodes. Finally, the thick metal-oxide layer can serve as a thin-film antireflection coating, which increases light absorption efficiency.
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.|Center for Electrochemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Li
L
Ji
Center for Electrochemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Hsien-Yi
HY
Hsu
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Xiaohan
X
Li
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Kai
K
Huang
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Ye
Y
Zhang
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Jack C
JC
Lee
Center for Electrochemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Allen J
AJ
Bard
Microelectronics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Edward T
ET
Yu