John O. Curry edited The_refinement_of_the_water__.tex  about 9 years ago

Commit id: ff91947abde89ba06511d57e76c2f4ee0848bf7d

deletions | additions      

       

The refinement of the water-splitting technology has not stopped with one successful example. Kibria et al. have demonstrated that neither an acidic solution nor multiple electrodes is necessary for the task, by constructing a single photocatalyst with the capacity to split pure H$_{2}$O in the presence of no other reagents\cite{Kibria_2013}. By embedding an InGaN well and 10 InGaN dots in a GaN nanowire, then decorating the heterostructure with rhodium/chromium oxide core-shell nanoparticles, the photocatalyst can facilitate both the evolution of H$_{2}$ and O$_{2}$. This wondrous photocatalyst did not only draw from the visible spectrum, but used the full range of InGaN to also use the portion of the band gap in the UV spectrum, adding its effectiveness to the that conferred by a 13 percent external  quantum efficiency in the 450 nm range of the visual spectrum.  However, this wondrous photocatalyst was not perfect-- Kibria et al. draw attention to the low external quantum efficiencies in the red and green wavelengths. This indicates the possibility for further investigations into using full-spectrum InGaN nanowires in the InGaN components of the photocatalyst, so as to utilize the entirety of the  visual spectrum.