A novel concept and design for highly efficient photoelectrocatalytic materials with high performance, stability, and charge transport properties: development of an innovative next-generation green technology.

In semiconductors, generating charges via catalysis is a highly challenging task and characteristic of heterojunction photoanodes. A dithiophene-4,8-dione spin-coated film layer has a positive effect on the holes (positive charge carriers) for a long time in BHJ films in the solid state of materials. The photoexcited holes created in the BHJ film can persist for long periods of time, which is beneficial for catalytic reactions. In this study, a photoanode is electrically coupled to a hydrogen gas-evolving platinum cathode. When the photoanode is electrically coupled to a H2 gas evolving Pt cathode, curiously long-lived hole polaron states are observed on the timescale of seconds under operational conditions. These long-lived holes play a crucial role in enhancing the hydrogen peroxide oxidation performance of the film overlayer spin-coated onto the photoanode. The spin-coated film overlayer on the photoanode achieves the best oxidation performance for hydrogen peroxide of approximately 6.5 mA cm-2 at 1.23 VRHE without the need of a catalyst. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the overlayer in improving the catalytic performance of the photoanode with a better efficiency of 17.5% when using 851 nm excitation. This indicates that a relatively high percentage of incident photons at that specific wavelength is converted into photocurrent by the photoanode. This approach can lead to more efficient oxidation catalysis as demonstrated in the case of hydrogen peroxide oxidation.