Performance of hydrogen evolution reaction of R3C ferroelectric ZnSnO3 nanowires

摘要

The synthesis of LiNbO3-type R3C ZnSnO3 is still a challenging task under an extremely high-pressure condition. In this work, we have not only successfully synthesized R3C ZnSnO3 nanowires (NWs) through a hydrothermal process, but ZnSnO3 NWs with a high concentration of oxygen vacancies (referred to as ZnSnO3v NWs), exhibiting a highly efficient hydrogen evolution reaction compared to unannealed ZnSnO3 and ZnO NWs. The x-ray diffraction pattern and Raman spectra both confirm that the as-synthesized ZnSnO3 NWs mainly belong to the R3C space group with a second phase of ZnSn(OH)(6). The conversion efficiency of the solar-to-hydrogen ZnSnO3v NWs and the unannealed ZnSnO3 NWs is 4.8% and 1.5%, respectively. The enhancement factor of the ZnSnO3v NWs is up to 320%. The photocurrent of the ZnSnO3 NWs and the ZnSnO3v NW photoelectrodes is even 5.39 and 16.23 times higher than that of the ZnO NWs, demonstrating that the high concentration of oxygen vacancies is regarded as a useful approach to enhance the photoelectrochemical response. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to reveal the performance of hydrogen evolution reaction by LiNbO3-type R3C ZnSnO3 NWs, which could offer a promising way of energy harvesting when using ferroelectric materials.