Achieving indirect‐to‐direct band gap transition and enhanced photocatalytic performance in blue phosphorene through doping and strain

Abstract

AbstractRecently, blue phosphorene (BP) has demonstrated great potential in the field of photocatalytic water splitting due to the ultrahigh carrier mobility. However, the practical application of BP as an efficient photocatalyst is greatly limited by its indirect band gap. In this work, we investigate the synergistic effect of substitutional doping and biaxial strain on the electronic and photocatalytic properties of BP using hybrid density functional calculations. The results show that As/Sb doping not only reduces the band gap of BP without introducing any midgap states but also turns it into direct band gap semiconductor, which can be ascribed to the p states of the dopants appearing around the band edges. For these As/Sb‐doped BP systems, the band gaps, band edge positions, and optical absorption abilities can be further tuned by applying a biaxial strain. In particular, we predict that compressive strains are more propitious for the doped systems than the tensile strains since the requirements for water splitting are satisfied, meanwhile preserving the direct band gap characteristics. Besides, our calculations also show that the band gap and the reducing and oxidizing power of multilayer BP are highly dependent on the layer thickness. These results suggest feasible modulation strategies for enabling BP to be a visible‐light‐driven photocatalyst for water splitting.