Modification of TiO Nanoparticles with Organodiboron Molecules Inducing Stable Surface Ti Complex.

As one of the most promising semiconductor oxide materials, titanium dioxide (TiO) absorbs UV light but not visible light. To address this limitation, the introduction of Ti defects represents a common strategy to render TiO visible-light responsive. Unfortunately, current hurdles in Ti generation technologies impeded the widespread application of Ti modified materials. Herein, we demonstrate a simple and mechanistically distinct approach to generating abundant surface-Ti sites without leaving behind oxygen vacancy and sacrificing one-off electron donors. In particular, upon adsorption of organodiboron reagents onto TiO nanoparticles, spontaneous electron injection from the diboron-bound O site to adjacent Ti site leads to an extremely stable blue surface Ti‒O complex. Notably, this defect generation protocol is also applicable to other semiconductor oxides including ZnO, SnO, NbO, and InO. Furthermore, the as-prepared photoelectronic device using this strategy affords 10-fold higher visible light response and the fabricated perovskite solar cell shows an enhanced performance.