Synthesis and Characterization of Titanium Doped Hematite for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Hematite is a potential candidate for hydrogen production by photoelectrochemical (PEC) decomposition of water due to its good bad gap and excellent chemical stability. However, its poor conductivity limits its PEC performance. Titanium has been predicted to be a good choice of dopant for improving the conductivity. Most of the Ti-doped hematite films are produced by solution based method. However, such procedure may introduce impurities. RF sputtering is a clean vacuum deposition technique, which is perfect for the synthesis of metal oxide. In this paper, we report our synthesis of Tidoped hematite thin films by RF magnetron co-sputtering of iron oxide and titanium targets at various conditions. Our work shows that the structure and morphology of iron oxide can be modified by controlling the doping concentration of titanium. Moreover, we confirmed that the PEC performance of Ti-doped iron oxide film is significantly better than the undoped one.