Application of ZnO single crystals for light-induced water splitting under UV irradiation

•ZnO single crystals show excellent performance as photoanodes for water splitting.•ZnO single crystals showed good stability in aqueous solution.•Mid-gap band state introduction does not influence the efficiency of water splitting.

This paper presents experimental results of implementation of ZnO single crystals as photoanodes in photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells for hydrogen generation through the process of water splitting. Both, as-grown and O2-annealed ZnO single crystals were investigated for this purpose. A 351 nm argon laser line was used as the light source. The XRD investigations showed that used ZnO crystals are of good crystalline quality. It was found that the as-grown ZnO single crystals possess higher conversion efficiencies comparing to the O2-annealed one. The photocurrent density was found to increase significantly with the increase of external bias applied and excitation light intensity. Time dependent photocurrent density characteristics showed that the decay of photocurrent density was not observed within the measurement time. The differences in behaviour of the as-grown and the annealed in O2 ZnO single crystals are discussed in terms of crystals intrinsic defects.