USING SURFACE PHOTOVOLTAGE SPECTROSCOPY AND PHOTOELECTROCHEMISTRY TO STUDY THE ELECTRONIC PROPERTIES OF SEMICONDUCTOR NANOCRYSTALS UNDER LIGHT EXCITATION FOR SOLAR WATER SPLITTING APPLICATIONS

摘要

The light-driven water splitting, with the ability of convertingnlight to fuels that can be used at anytime and distributed to anywhere,ndemonstrates a great promise among a variety of technologies aimingnat using solar light as the energy source1. Nano-materials arenexpected to benefit the water splitting performance because of thenshorter distance the light generated electrons and holes need to travelninside the materials before they recombine and the larger surface tonvolume ratio they have to allow more surface catalytic reactions.nQuantum dots (QDs), especially CdSe QDs, have been studiednintensively because their size-dependent quantum confinement effectnopen up an opportunity to tune their properties via size-control. Yetnthe effect that size has on charge separation and photocatalysis isnexperimentally less established than the effect of size on the opticalnpropertie