Study of semiconductor/electrolyte interface using the Fourier transformation of photovoltage response to periodic laser pulses

Charge transfer processes at the TiO2/electrolyte interface have been studied using periodic short laser pulses (337 nm) as probe. A model has been developed to determine a number of semiconductor characteristics from the Fourier image of the photovoltage response induced by the periodic pulsed excitation. It has been shown that the capacitance of depletion and Helmholtz layers, flatband potential, doping density and dielectric constant of a semiconductor electrode as well as the surface recombination rate can be determined by this method, even for polycrystalline semiconductor films exhibiting non-linear Mott–Schottky dependencies.