Morphology-controlled fabrication of nanostructured WO3 thin films by magnetron sputtering with glancing angle deposition for enhanced efficiency photo-electrochemical water splitting

Herein, the tungsten trioxide (WO3) nanostructure thin films with different morphologies are firstly fabricated by magnetron sputtering with glancing angle deposition technique (MS-GLAD), followed by the post annealed treatment process in air ambient for 2 h. It is demonstrated that the geometry of MS-GLAD setup, mainly substrate position, played a crucial role in determining the morphology, crystallinity, optical transmittance, and photo-electrochemical (PEC) performance of the WO3 nanostructured thin film. With the different substrate positions in the MS-GLAD system, the WO3 nanorod film layer could be precisely changed to combine an underlying dense layer with a nanorod layer and then nanocolumnar film. Moreover, the prepared samples' chemical composition and work function are studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS), respectively. The combining WO3 nanostructure produced high PEC efficiency compared to the single layer of the WO3 nanorods sample and the dense WO3 thin film sample. Thus, morphology-controlled nanostructure film based on the MS-GLAD technique in our study provides a simple approach to enhance the photo-anode for PEC water splitting application.