Performance of Hydrogen Evolution Reaction of R3C Ferroelectric ZnSnO3 Nanowires

The synthesis of the LiNbO3-type R3C ZnSnO3 is still a challenging task under an extremely high-pressure condition. This work, we have not only successfully synthesized the R3C ZnSnO3 nanowires through the hydrothermal process, but also the ZnSnO3 nanowires with a high concentration of oxygen vacancies (referred to as ZnSnO3V NWs), exhibiting a highly efficient hydrogen evolution reaction as compared to those un-annealed ZnSnO3 and ZnO nanowires. The x-ray diffraction pattern and the Raman spectra both confirm that the as-synthesized ZnSnO3 nanowires mainly belong to the R3C space group with a second phase of the ZnSn(OH)6. The conversion efficiency of the solar-to-hydrogen ZnSnO3V NWs and the un-annealed ZnSnO3 nanowires were 4.8% and 1.5%, respectively. The enhancement factor of the ZnSnO3V NWs is up to 320%. The photocurrent of the ZnSnO3 NWs and the ZnSnO3v NWs' photoelectrodes even exhibited 5.39 and 16.23 times higher than that of the ZnO NWs, demonstrating that the high concentration of oxygen vacancies is regarded as a useful approach to enhance the PEC response. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to reveal the performance of the HER by the LiNbO3-type R3C ZnSnO3 NWs, which could offer a promising way of energy harvesting when using the ferroelectric materials.