Recent Progress of Metal Sulfide Photocatalysts for Solar Energy Conversion

Artificial photosynthetic solar-to-chemical cycles enable an entire environment to operate in a more complex, yet effective, way to perform natural photosynthesis. However, such artificial systems suffer from a lack of well-established photocatalysts with the ability to harvest the solar spectrum and rich catalytic active-site density. Benefiting from extensive experimental and theoretical investigations, this bottleneck may be overcome by devising a photocatalytic platform based on metal sulfides with predominant electronic, physical, and chemical properties. These tunable properties can endow them with abundant active sites, favorable light utilization, and expedited charge transportation for solar-to-chemical conversion. Here, it is described how some vital lessons extracted from previous investigations are employed to promote the further development of metal sulfides for artificial photosynthesis, including water splitting, CO2 reduction, N-2 reduction, and pollutant removal. Their functions, properties, synthetic strategies, emerging issues, design principles, and intrinsic functional mechanisms for photocatalytic redox reactions are discussed in detail. Finally, the associated challenges and prospects for the utilization of metal sulfides are highlighted and future development trends in photocatalysis are envisioned.

Automated summary

This article describes how metal sulfides can be used to promote the development of artificial photosynthesis, including water splitting, CO2 reduction, N-2 reduction, and pollutant removal. Metal sulfides have abundant active sites, favorable light utilization, and expedited charge transportation, making them promising photocatalysts.