高光学质量氮化碳薄膜的制备和表征

氮化碳(graphitic carbon nitride,g-CN)作为一种非金属半导体材料已被广泛应用于多种能源相关领域研究中。目前由于制备高质量g-CN薄膜的困难,大大限制了其在实际器件上的应用。本文中,我们报道了一种可制备高光学质量gCN薄膜的方法:即由三聚氰胺先通过热聚合制备本体g-CN粉末,再由本体g-CN粉末经过气相沉积在ITO导电玻璃或钠钙玻璃基底上制备g-CN薄膜。扫描电子显微镜和原子力显微镜的测量结果表明在ITO玻璃基底上形成的g-CN薄膜形貌结构均一且致密,厚度约为300nm。扫描电镜能量色散能谱和X射线光电子能谱测量结果表明在ITO玻璃基底上制备的g-CN薄膜的化学组成与本体g-CN粉末的化学组成基本一致。同时,我们发现制备的g-CN薄膜和本体g-CN粉末一样在光照射下可以有效降解亚甲基蓝染料。此外,我们还测量了制备的g-CN薄膜的稳态吸收光谱、稳态荧光光谱、荧光寿命和价带谱,并运用吸收光谱和价带谱数据确定了其能带结构。

Preparation and Characterization of Carbon Nitride Film with High Optical Quality

Graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN), as a nonmetal semiconductor material, has been widely used in various fields, such as photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, batteries, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells, owing to its unique electronic and photophysical properties. However, the application of g-CN in practical devices remains limited because of the difficulties in fabricating g-CN films of high quality. In this work, we report a method for preparing a g-CN film with high optical quality on a substrate of indium tin oxide (ITO) glass and/or soda lime (NaCa) glass by using melamine as a precursor. First, we prepared the bulk g-CN from melamine in a muffle furnace via thermal polymerization. Then, we fabricated the g-CN film on the ITO and/or NaCa glass substrate with fine-milled, bulk g-CN in a tube furnace using thermal vapor deposition. With this two-step method, a yellow, transparent g-CN film with high optical quality was successfully fabricated on both the ITO and/or NaCa glass substrates. To check the quality of the film, we used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to study the morphology of the fabricated g-CN film on the ITO glass substrate. Both the high-resolution and low-resolution SEM image results show that the obtained g-CN film on the ITO glass substrate had a homogeneous and dense structure without a corrugated surface, illustrating that it had good surface roughness. Then, we investigated the thickness and surface roughness of the g-CN film via atomic force microscopy (AFM). The AFM results show that the thickness of the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate was around 300 nm and that the surface roughness of the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate was less than 40 nm. To verify the chemical composition of the obtained g-CN film on the ITO glass substrate, we performed X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analyses. Both the XPS and EDS results demonstrate that the chemical composition of the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate was similar to that of bulk g-CN powder. More importantly, we determined the band structure for the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate by using a combination of steady-state absorption and high-resolution valence band XPS analysis. It was found that the determined band structure for the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate was close to that of bulk g-CN powder, also indicating that its chemical composition was similar to that of bulk g-CN. Meanwhile, we also found that the prepared g-CN film on the ITO glass substrate effectively degraded methylene blue dye under Xe lamp irradiation, which was similar to the effect of bulk g-CN powder. All analyses performed demonstrate that the two-step method presented in this study could successfully fabricate a g-CN film with high optical quality. In addition, we also analyzed the fluorescence lifetime of the g-CN film deposited on the ITO glass substrate by using a homemade time-correlated single-photon counting apparatus and found that it was much shorter than that of bulk g-CN.