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Ferroelectric based heterostructures have shown great promises in solar water splitting due to unique photoelectrochemical (PEC) properties including polarization-induced charge separation and tunable electrochemical surface reaction. A highly ordered ferroelectric BiFeO 3 /TiO 2 nanotube (TNT) heterostructures were fabricated by anodic oxidation and pulsed laser deposition. The microscopic morphology, optical, and PEC properties of nanostructures were characterized. The BiFeO 3 /TNT photoelectrode is photoactive under visible light illumination, which exhibits higher photocurrent from greater water oxidation, compared with the pure TNT photoelectrode. The coating thickness of BiFeO 3 strongly affected the photoelectrochemical properties. The enhanced PEC performance could be attributed to the effective charge separation and the favorable band bending for water oxidation, originating from ferroelectric polarization-related internal field.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) based on titanium dioxide () have been extensively studied because of their promising low-cost alternatives to conventional semiconductor based solar cells. DSSCs consist of molecular dye at the interface between a liquid electrolyte and a mesoporous wide-bandgap semiconductor oxide. Most efforts for high conversion efficiencies have focused on dye and liquid electrolytes. However, interface engineering between dye and electrode is also important to reduce recombination and improve efficiency. In this work, for interface engineering, we deposited semiconducting ferroelectric with bandgap of 2.8 eV on nanoparticles and nanotubes. Photovoltaic properties of DSSCs were characterized as a function of thickness of . We showed that ferroelectric -coated electrodes enable to increase overall efficiency of DSSCs, which was associated with efficient electron transport due to internal electric field originating from electric polarization. It was suggested that engineering the dye- interface using ferroelectric materials as inorganic modifiers can be key parameter for enhanced photovoltaic performance of the cell.