Amorphous FeCoPOx nanowires coupled to g-C3N4 nanosheets with enhanced interfacial electronic transfer for boosting photocatalytic hydrogen production

The building of an optimized interface between the cocatalyst and the photoactive materials is significant for understanding the charge transfer mechanism and designing high-performance catalysts at atomic level, however, still a great challenge. Herein, we develop a new method to synthesize a class of hybrid photocatalyst by coupling amorphous FeCoPOxnanowires (FeCoPOx(NWs)) tog-C3N4 photocataysts (denote as FeCoPOx(NWs)-C3N4) for greatly boosting the photocatalytic activity, which shows 3.5-fold higher H2-production activity than the state-of-art crystalline FeCoPOy nanoparticles/g-C3N4 hybrid photocataysts (denote as FeCoPOy(NPs)-C3N4). The structure analysis by X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) reveals that the Fe species in FeCoPOx(NWs)-C3N4 owns a lower coordination number than that in FeCoPOy(NPs)-C3N4, which can contribute to the formation of strong interface between FeCoPOx(NWs) and g-C3N4. The first-principles simulation confirms that the amorphous FeCoPOx(NWs) not only can build a stable interface with g-C3N4 by forming more Fe-N bonds, but also own an optimized electronic properties for enhancing electron transfer from g-C3N4 to FeCoPOx(NWs). The strong interfacial electronic effect of FeCoPOx(NWs)-C3N4 contributes to its high H2-production activity.This work not only develops a new method to prepare the high-performance low-cost cocatalyst as Pt alternative for H2 production, but also provide a new insight into optimizing the interface between cocatalyst and photocatalyst for photocatalytic reaction.