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 1.0 V and 1.6 V transforms the NiO and NiFeO into oxyhydroxides known to possess higher catalytic activities. However, these oxyhydroxides lead to lower photoelectrochemical performance compared to the as-loaded oxides, most probably due to the decay of the passivation centers at the photoelectrode-cocatalyst interface. High catalytic activities cannot be achieved without sufficient passivation of surface recombination states. Despite that the photoelectrochemical performance of LaTaON can be improved by cocatalysts, the maximum achievable photocurrent density is still not comparable to that reported for other oxynitride compounds. Our study suggests that poor electronic conductivity or severe bulk recombination of the photo-generated electron-hole pairs are the main limiting factors for the photon-to-current conversion efficiency in LaTaON photoanodes.