Highly-ordered mesoporous titania thin films prepared via surfactant assembly on conductive indium–tin-oxide/glass substrate and its optical properties

Abstract Highly ordered mesoporous titanium dioxide (titania, TiO2) thin films on indium–tin-oxide (ITO) coated glass were prepared via a Pluronic (P123) block copolymer template and a hydrophilic TiO2 buffer layer. The contraction of the 3D hexagonal array of P123 micelles upon calcination merges the titania domains on the TiO2 buffer layer to form mesoporous films with a mesochannel diameter of approximately 10 nm and a pore-to-pore distance of 10 nm. The mesoporous titania films on TiO2-buffered ITO/glass featured an inverse mesospace with a hexagonally-ordered structure, whereas the films formed without a TiO2 buffer layer had a disordered microstructure with submicron cracks because of non-uniform water condensation on the hydrophobic ITO/glass surface. The density of the mesoporous film was 83% that of a bulk TiO2 film. The optical band gap of the mesoporous titania thin film was approximately 3.4 eV, larger than that for nonporous anatase TiO2 (~ 3.2 eV), suggesting that the nanoscopic grain size leads to an increase in the band gap due to weak quantum confinement effects. The ability to form highly-ordered mesoporous titania films on electrically conductive and transparent substrates offers the potential for facile fabrication of high surface area semiconductive films with small diffusion lengths for optoelectronics applications.