Dispelling the Myth of Passivated Codoping in TiO2

Modification of TiO₂ to increase its visible light activity and promote higher performance photocatalytic ability has become a key research goal for materials scientists in the past 2 decades. One of the most popular approaches proposed this as "passivated codoping", whereby an equal number of donor and acceptor dopants are introduced into the lattice, producing a charge neutral system with a reduced band gap. Using the archetypal codoping pairs of [Nb + N]- and [Ta + N]-doped anatase, we demonstrate using hybrid density functional theory that passivated codoping is not achievable in TiO₂. Our results indicate that the natural defect chemistry of the host system (in this case n-type anatase TiO₂) is dominant, and so concentration parity of dopant types is not achievable under any thermodynamic growth conditions. The implications of passivated codoping for band gap manipulation in general are discussed.