Recent experiments demonstrated that interfacial water dissociation (H2O = H+ + OH-) could be accelerated exponentially by an electric field applied to graphene electrodes, a phenomenon related to the Wien effect. Here we report an order-of-magnitude acceleration of the interfacial water dissociation reaction under visible-light illumination. This process is accompanied by spatial separation of protons and hydroxide ions across one-atom-thick graphene and enhanced by strong interfacial electric fields. The found photo-effect is attributed to the combination of graphene's perfect selectivity with respect to protons, which prevents proton-hydroxide recombination, and to proton transport acceleration by the Wien effect, which occurs in synchrony with the water dissociation reaction. Our findings provide fundamental insights into ion dynamics near atomically-thin proton-selective interfaces and suggest that strong interfacial fields can enhance and tune very fast ionic processes, which is of relevance for applications in photo-catalysis and designing reconfigurable materials.
@article{arxiv.2210.17438,
title = {Photo-accelerated water dissociation across one-atom-thick electrodes},
author = {J. Cai and E. Griffin and V. Guarochico-Moreira and D. Barry and B. Xin and S. Huang and A. K. Geim and F. M. Peeters and M. Lozada-Hidalgo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.17438},
year = {2022}
}