Carbon dots dominated photoelectric surface in titanium dioxide nanotube/nitrogen-doped carbon dot/gold nanocomposites for improved photoelectrochemical water splitting

Abstract The dynamic behavior of electron-hole pairs at the interface of the nanocomposites is important for photoelectrochemical catalysis, but it is difficult to characterize. Here we construct a ternary titanium dioxide/nitrogen-doped carbon dot/gold (TiO2/NCD/Au) complex as the model catalyst to investigate the kinetic indexes at their interfaces. Under irradiation (200 mW cm−2), the photocurrent density of TiO2/NCD/Au is 10.26 mA cm−2, which is higher than those of TiO2/Au (4.34 mA cm−2), TiO2/NCD (7.55 mA cm−2) and TiO2 (3.34 mA cm−2). The evolved oxygen of TiO2/NCD/Au reaches 125.8 μmol after 5000 s test. The energy bands of complexes are very similar to that of the unmodified TiO2 catalyst due to the low content modification of NCDs and Au. In addition, the transient photovoltage (TPV) tests with a series of control samples show differences about the carriers’ separation and transfer process, which verify that Au can increase the separation quantity of electron-hole pairs while NCDs play a more important role on the increase of the separation quantity and separation rate simultaneously. This work quantifies the function of each component in a composite catalyst and deepens the understanding of the catalyst interface design.