Oxygen evolution at the BiVO₄-water interface: mechanism of the water dehydrogenation reaction

We study the water dehydrogenation reaction at the BiVO₄(010)-water interface by combining nudged-elastic-band calculations and electronic structure calculations at the hybrid functional level. We investigate the pathway and the kinetic barrier for the adiabatic reaction going from the hole polaron localized in BiVO₄ to the dehydrogenation of the adsorbed water molecule at the interface. The reaction is found to involve the H2O•⁺ radical cation as intermediate, to have a kinetic barrier of 0.7 eV, and to be initiated by the electron transfer. The calculated kinetic barrier is in good agreement with experiment and is consistent with the slow hole transfer kinetics observed at the surface of BiVO₄. To characterize the structural changes occurring during this process, we analyze the O-H distances for three relevant water molecules. We also examine the Wannier functions around the O atom of the adsorbate involved in the reaction to reveal the changes in the electronic structure during the hole hopping. The projected density of states of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals allows us to identify the atomic orbitals that are primarily involved in the reaction. We expect that the proposed reaction mechanism generally holds when the surface coverage is dominated by molecularly adsorbed water.