Enhanced Proton Conductivity in Y-Doped BaZrO via Strain Engineering.

The effects of stress-induced lattice distortions (strain) on the conductivity of Y-doped BaZrO, a high-temperature proton conductor with key technological applications for sustainable electrochemical energy conversion, are studied. Highly ordered epitaxial thin films are grown in different strain states while monitoring the stress generation and evolution in situ. Enhanced proton conductivity due to lower activation energies is discovered under controlled conditions of tensile strain.

Investigating the behavior of various cocatalysts on LaTaON photoanode for visible light water splitting.

We performed a comparative study on the photoelectrochemical performance of LaTaON loaded with NiO, NiFeO, CoO and IrO as cocatalysts. Ni-based oxides lead to the highest improvement on the photoelectrochemical performance, while CoO and IrO also enhance the performance though to a lower extent, but they simultaneously introduce more pseudocapacitive current thus resulting in an inefficient utilization of the photo-generated holes. Repetitive voltage cycling between 1.

In situ stress observation in oxide films and how tensile stress influences oxygen ion conduction.

Many properties of materials can be changed by varying the interatomic distances in the crystal lattice by applying stress. Ideal model systems for investigations are heteroepitaxial thin films where lattice distortions can be induced by the crystallographic mismatch with the substrate. Here we describe an in situ simultaneous diagnostic of growth mode and stress during pulsed laser deposition of oxide thin films.