Antimony-doped tin oxide nanorods as a transparent conducting electrode for enhancing photoelectrochemical oxidation of water by hematite.

We report the growth of well-defined antimony-doped tin oxide (ATO) nanorods as a conductive scaffold to improve hematite's photoelectrochemical water oxidation performance. The hematite grown on ATO exhibits greatly improved performance for photoelectrochemical water oxidation compared to hematite grown on flat fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO). The optimized photocurrent density of hematite on ATO is 0.67 mA/cm(2) (0.6 V vs Ag/AgCl), which is much larger than the photocurrent density of hematite on flat FTO (0.03 mA/cm(2)). Using H2O2 as a hole scavenger, it is shown that the ATO nanorods indeed act as a useful scaffold and enhanced the bulk charge separation efficiency of hematite from 2.5% to 18% at 0.4 V vs Ag/AgCl.