Structural and electrochemical analysis of a novel co-electrodeposited Mn2O3–Au nanocomposite thin film

In this work we report the fabrication of both pristine Mn2O3 and Mn2O3-Au composite thin films on an indium tin oxide (ITO) substrate by a one-step novel co-electrodeposition technique. From the electron microscopy study, we observed that these two films are morphologically different. The main aim of this study is to understand the effect of the nanostructure and metal integration on the electrochemical charge storage properties of these two films. Since a charge storage mechanism is possible through faradic red-ox reaction and non-faradic double layered process, electrochemical characterization and frequency response analysis indicate better charge storage properties of the composite system over pristine Mn2O3. The Mott-Schottky analysis is used for the charge carrier estimation which provides the electronic properties of both the samples. Besides the mechanism of the co-electrodeposition technique, we also discuss in detail the material characterization of both pristine Mn2O3 and Mn2O3-Au composite samples using XRD, EELS and electron microscopy analysis. To the best of our knowledge, the electrochemical properties of the Mn2O3-Au composite sample are reported here for the first time.