Optical and electronic properties of transition metal oxide based composite materials

Abstract

Transition metal oxides (TMO) is an interesting group of oxides with a wide variety surface structures which affect the surface energy of these compounds and influence the chemical, optical, electrical and magnetic properties. Many of these properties strongly depends on materials defects like vacancies, dislocations, stacking faults and grain boundaries. The unusual properties of these oxides are due to the unique nature of outermost d-band configuration. In the present studies we define the mixture of two TMO in any ratio as a composite material. Such composite materials have been studies from last few decades due to their intriguing properties and technological importance. In order to introduce multi functionality, the composite materials appear to be one of the simple and widely adopted choices of various research groups. Recently the composite materials have been used for hydrogen production using water splitting and solar cell applications and appear to be most successful as compared with that of other counterparts. Even though lots of successful experimental evidences are available in the literature on the potentials of composite materials but the scientific origin and the understanding of physics of composite materials is still unclear. It is believed that the formation of interfacial junction plays a very crucial role. In case the junction is getting formed the signature of the same is easily found out using UV visible spectroscopy. Keeping this in view; the project is aimed to understand the effect of mixing various transition metal oxides by different methodology and to check the signature of junction formation if any and to investigate structural and optical properties.