Unveiling the role of carbon defects in the exceptional narrowing of m-ZrO2 bandgap for enhanced photoelectrochemical water splitting performance

The development of efficient photoelectrodes via defect engineering of wide-band gap metal oxides has been the prime focus for many years. Specifically, the effect of carbon defects in wide-band gap metal oxides on their performance in photoelectrochemical (PEC) applications raised numerous controversies and still elusive. Herein, the effect of various carbon defects in m-ZrO2 was investigated using the density functional theory to probe the thermodynamic, electronic, and optical properties of the defective structures against pristine m-ZrO2. The defect formation energies revealed that elevating the temperature promotes and facilitates the formation of carbon defects. Moreover, the binding energies confirmed the stability of all studied complex carbon defects. Furthermore, the band edge positions against the redox potentials of water species revealed that all the studied defective structures can serve as photoanodes for water splitting. Additionally, CO3c (carbon atom substituted O3c site) was the only defective structure that exhibited slight straddling of the redox potentials of water. Importantly, all investigated defective structures enhanced light absorption with different optical activities. Finally, CO3cVO3c (carbon atom substituted O3c associated with O3c vacancy) defective m-ZrO2 enjoyed low direct band gap (1.9 eV), low defect formation energy, low exciton binding energy, high mobility of charge carriers, fast charge transfer, and low recombination rate. Concurrently, its optical properties were exceptional in terms of high absorption, low reflectivity and improved static dielectric constant. Hence, the study recommends CO3cVO3c defective m-ZrO2 as the leading candidate to serve as a photoanode for PEC applications.