High-Performance H₂ Photosynthesis from Pure Water over Ru-S Charge Transfer Channels

As a versatile energy carrier, H₂ is considered as one of the most promising sources of clean energy to tackle the current energy crisis and environmental concerns, which can be produced from photocatalytic water splitting. However, solar-driven photocatalytic H₂ production from pure water in the absence of sacrificial reagents remains a great challenge. Herein, we demonstrate that the incorporation of Ru single atoms (SAs) into ZnIn₂S₄ (Ru-ZIS) can enhance the light absorption, reduce the energy barriers for water dissociation, and construct a channel (Ru-S) for separating photogenerated electron-hole pairs, as a result of a significantly enhanced photocatalytic water splitting process. Impressively, the productivity of H₂ reaches 735.2 μmol g^-1 h^-1 under visible light irradiation in the absence of sacrificial agents. The apparent quantum efficiency (AQE) for H₂ evolution reaches 7.5% at 420 nm, with a solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 0.58%, which is much higher than the value of natural synthetic plants (∼0.10%). Moreover, Ru-ZIS exhibits steady productivity of H₂ even after exposure to ambient conditions for 330 days. This work provides a unique strategy for constructing charge transfer channels to promote the separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs, which may motivate the fundamental researches on catalyst design for photocatalysis and beyond. © 2024 The Authors. Co-published by University of Science and Technology of China and American Chemical Society.