ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ 728
References ............................................................................................................ 728
18.1 INTRODUCTION
The discovery of photoeffects at the metal-electrolyte interface can be traced to the
studies of Becquerel in the first half of the 19th century (1). Although earlier studies
on photoelectrochemical behavior of oxidized metals were reviewed at the beginning
of the 1940s (2), there is no doubt that the beginning of photoelectrochemical science
can be marked with the work of Brattain and Garrett (3) that appeared in the mid-
1950s. The state of the art of these initial studies can be found in the review by
Gerischer (4) and in the classical book by Myamlin and Pleskov (5). It may be of
interest to mention that in the appendix of this book a paper (6) summarized the most
immediate problems in electrochemistry of semiconductors as: ‘‘The important prob-
lem remains of extending the theoretical concepts and experimental investigation
methods to polycrystalline semiconductors, in particular, oxide films on so-called
barrier metals and to oxide and sulfide electrodes and also to use the concepts of the
electrochemistry of semiconductors for investigating the phenomena of the passiv-
ation of metals.’’ This last task was initially undertaken by Oshe and Rozenfel’d (7),
who proposed to characterize the nature of passive films on metals by using a
photopotential method initially proposed by Williams (8) for bulk semiconductors.
