Efficient light-to-current conversion by organic–inorganic interfacial charge-transfer transitions in TiO2 chemically adsorbed with 2-anthroic acid

Organic–inorganic interfacial charge-transfer (ICT) transitions provide the concepts that organic–inorganic interfaces serve as a field for light absorption and charge separation directly occurs without energy loss. Here, we report efficient light-to-current conversion due to the ICT transitions in TiO2 chemically adsorbed with 2-anthroic acid. The incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) surpasses 85%, showing the significant improvement as compared to the reported results. Density functional analysis shows that the ICT absorption arises from strong dπ–π* interactions at the inorganic–organic interface. In addition, we examined the density of states (DOS) of unoccupied surface states on TiO2 from the absorption and IPCE spectra.