Niobium Doping Enhances Charge Transport in TiO₂ Nanorods

Abstract The charge‐transport behavior of nanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is of great interest because of the wide range of applications. In this work, we demonstrate a facile approach to improve electron transport in TiO₂ nanorods (NRs) by introducing niobium (Nb) dopant into the lattice of TiO₂. The TiO₂‐NRs doped with Nb were grown directly on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates by a facile hydrothermal method and used directly as the photoanodes for water oxidation. The TiO₂ nanorod electrode doped with 0.25 % of Nb showed 65 % improvement in photocurrent as compared with the pristine TiO₂ nanorod electrode. Furthermore, by simply changing the light illuminating direction, the improvement of charge transport induced by Nb doping could be easily identified.