To achieve high efficient water splitting, sunlight has to be efficiently absorbed and utilized. However, these wide band-gap semiconductors only absorb a small portion of sunlight, resulting in the poor water splitting efficiency. In the past decades, metal oxide semiconductors with wide band-gap have been widely explored as oxygen evolving photoanode due to their excellent stability in oxidizing environments. As compared to water reduction reaction for hydrogen generation, water oxidation involves complex proton-coupled electron transfer process and the generation of oxygen is even more difficult. Solar water splitting has a long history and continued to stimulate great interest in scientist around the world due to its promising application in storing the energy of the sun in the form of chemical fuels ( Fujishima and Honda, 1972 Bard and Fox, 1995 Chen et al., 2010). This method opens a promising venue to cost-efficient production of solar fuels. Without any assistance from an external electrical source and sacrificial reagents, gold-sensitized n-Si/n-ZnO core/shell nanowire array photoanode achieved unbiased water splitting under simulated solar light illumination. We demonstrated gold-sensitized n-Si/n-ZnO nanowire arrays exhibited higher energy conversion efficiency than gold-sensitized p-Si/n-ZnO nanowire arrays due to the favorable energy-band alignment characteristics. Here, a gold-sensitized Si/ZnOcore/shell nanowire photoelectrochemical (PEC) cell is reported for efficient solar water oxidation. However, low conversion efficiency, use of sacrificial agents, and external bias for current water splitting system limit its practical application. Solar water splitting represents one of the most promising strategies in the quest for clean and renewable energy. Department of Physics and Beijing Key Laboratory of Energy Conversion and Storage Materials, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.Fu-Qiang Zhang, Ya Hu, Rui-Nan Sun, Haoxin Fu and Kui-Qing Peng *
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