Structured Zinc Indium Sulfide films with hierarchical porosity

Description

As the demand in greener energy sources is rising, solar energy with its basically inexhaustible amount not only provides a great potential the future of energy production, but also in the form of photocatalysis. With applications in solar cells, photocatalysis as well as energy storage, metal sulfides arise as a versatile material class. Many reports of the synthesis, characterization and application of metal sulfide thin films can be found in literature, however only few explore the topic of structured metal sulfide thin films. To obtain structured thin films different templating procedures are employed, with soft-templating methods utilizing directing agents and hard-templating ones using for example mesoporous silica. In this work nanosphere colloidal lithography with polystyrene nanospheres and metal xanthate precursors was used.
Polystyrene nanospheres (PS-NS) with approximate diameters of 0.3 µm were deployed as templating agent via a self-assembly process at an air/liquid interface, forming a PS-NS monolayer. As this creates a tightly array of PS-NS, the nanospheres were isotropically reduced in an O2 plasma, in order to create infiltratable interstitial sites. The templates are then infiltrated by a metal xanthate precursor solution with a subsequent thermal treatment. This thermally converted the xanthates to the respective metal sulfides, creating mesopores in the process and ultimately removed the PS-NS template, leaving macropores with sizes of 275 ± 7 nm.

Period	12 Apr 2023
Event title	DocDays 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Graz, AustriaShow on map