Plasmonic Cocatalyst with Electric and Thermal Stimuli Boots Solar Hydrogen Evolution

Exploring low-cost and high-activity cocatalysts cooperated with semiconductors is a prerequisite to advance cost-efficient photocatalytic water splitting. Herein, nickel nanoparticles (NNPs) loaded on graphitic carbon nitride (CN) as unique non-noble metal cocatalysts with electric and thermal excitation upon surface plasmon for photocatalytic hydrogen (H-2) evolution reaction (HER) are designed. The plasmonic NNPs not only endow highly active sites, steering hot electron extraction from excited CN toward HER against charge recombination, but also act as full-spectrum light-harvesting antennas enabling plasmon heating for kinetic acceleration. As a result, the optimized CN/NNP hybrid exhibits a significant increase in the H-2-evolution rate up to 13.23 mmol g(-1) h(-1) with temperature up to 73 degrees C within 2 h, which far surpasses bare CN and even outperforms CN/Pt hybrid. This work describes the capacity of plasmonic cocatalysts to convert the supplementary photon flux into numerous stimuli, which provides new inspirations for designing photocatalytic systems for solar energy conversion.