Quantitative analysis of photons' decaying pathways in Si nanowire arrays for highly efficient photoelectrochemical solar hydrogen generation

We quantitatively investigated excitons' decaying pathways of photon-excited SiNW arrays to determine the reason for their low performances. It is demonstrated that excitons decay through both carriers' separation and energy transfer due to Si's indirect-band-gap feature, and these two pathways could be regulated through surface modification.