Photoelectrochemical water splitting using solar energy,generating oxygen and hydrogen is one of the clean fuel production processes.Inspired by surface-dependent characteristics of Janus structures,a newly designed J...Photoelectrochemical water splitting using solar energy,generating oxygen and hydrogen is one of the clean fuel production processes.Inspired by surface-dependent characteristics of Janus structures,a newly designed Janus monolayer Silicon Phosphorous Arsenide(SiPAs)was analyzed with Density Functional Theory(DFT)methods.Hybrid exchange-correlation functional(HSE06)combined with Wannier90-based analysis for electronic and optical properties of SiPAs reveals that it can act as a photocatalyst.SiPAs show an indirect bandgap of 1.88 eV,absorbing visible light range is 350 to 500 nm.The phonon spectrum confirms dynamic stability.The exciton binding energy is computed with GW/BSE methods.The electronic band edge positions are at-5.75 and-4.43 eV,perfectly straddling the water redox potentials.Interestingly the strain application modifies the bandgap and also non-homogenously widens the absorption band.A novel range of photocatalyst designs with Group IV-V elements with great promise for water-splitting,photovoltaic,and narrow bandgap semiconductor(optoelectronics)applications may be feasible.展开更多
基金the financial support for conducting part of the computational work,by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council(ARC)under the centre of Excellence scheme(Project No.CE170100026)National Computational Infrastructure(NCI),a National Facility for computing resources.S K M also acknowledges the computing system resources’support from the University of Tsukuba,Japan through the International Postdoctoral Fellowship of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS)’s KAKENHI(Grant No.JP22F32733)+1 种基金during the computational work and finalization of this studyS K M also acknowledges the support of Mr Matta Sai Aneesh,University of Queensland,Australia while preparing the graphical abstract.
文摘Photoelectrochemical water splitting using solar energy,generating oxygen and hydrogen is one of the clean fuel production processes.Inspired by surface-dependent characteristics of Janus structures,a newly designed Janus monolayer Silicon Phosphorous Arsenide(SiPAs)was analyzed with Density Functional Theory(DFT)methods.Hybrid exchange-correlation functional(HSE06)combined with Wannier90-based analysis for electronic and optical properties of SiPAs reveals that it can act as a photocatalyst.SiPAs show an indirect bandgap of 1.88 eV,absorbing visible light range is 350 to 500 nm.The phonon spectrum confirms dynamic stability.The exciton binding energy is computed with GW/BSE methods.The electronic band edge positions are at-5.75 and-4.43 eV,perfectly straddling the water redox potentials.Interestingly the strain application modifies the bandgap and also non-homogenously widens the absorption band.A novel range of photocatalyst designs with Group IV-V elements with great promise for water-splitting,photovoltaic,and narrow bandgap semiconductor(optoelectronics)applications may be feasible.