LAUSR

Hematite nanoarchitecture offers opportunities to simultaneously enhance the light harvesting and charge transport, which are the key to boosting the photoactivity for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water oxidation. However, it still remains a challenge to efficiently design and synthesize the nanostructures realizing that in hematite photoanodes. To address this problem, herein we develop an ingenious hierarchical ball-on-wire-array (BWA) structure that can simultaneously improve light harvesting and carrier transport, via a serial growth strategy that is able to feasibly decorate hematite nanowire arrays with in situ generated tunable nanoballs. The simulation and experimental results prove that the nanoballs provide additional light trapping for the augmented light scattering and absorption, and synchronously the orientational nanowire arrays enhance the charge transport in the hierarchical nanostructure. As a result, the hematite BWA photoanode coated with a nickel–iron-based oxygen evolution catalyst (OE...