Synthesis of copper oxide by reactive magnetron sputtering for photoelectrochemical water splitting

摘要

Copper oxide contains of bivalent copper and monovalent copper, which is widely distributed in earth resources. In this article, the copper oxide films were deposited on transparent conducting glasses (FTO) by magnetron reactive sputtering under different sputtering conditions of power and oxygen flow. The use of reactive magnetron sputtering can deposit a uniform copper oxide film with large scale rapidly. An analysis in detail on composition, morphology, optical and electrochemical properties of the sputtered copper oxide film was carried out. It is found that, the copper oxide with sputtering power of 30 W and O_2 flow of 7 sccm provide a photoinduced current of -3.0 mA cm~(-2) under a bias potential of -0.5 V (vs. Ag/AgCl), which was found to be near 1.5 times higher than that with O_2 flow of 5 sccm (30 W), and 3 times higher than O_2 flow of 7 sccm (60 W), respectively.