Molybdenum disulfide quantum dots directing zinc indium sulfide heterostructures for enhanced visible light hydrogen production.

Photocatalytic hydrogen (H) production based on semiconductors is important to utilize solar light for clean energy and environment. Herein, we report a visible light responsive heterostructure, designed and constructed by molybdenum disulfide quantum dots (MoS-QDs) in-situ seeds-directing growth and self-assemble of zinc indium sulfide (ZnInS) nanosheet to ensure their full contact through a simple one-step solvothermal method for highly improved visible light H production. The MoS-QDs in-situ seeds-directing ZnInS heterostructure not only builds heterojunctions between MoS and ZnInS to spatially separate the photogenerated electrons and holes, but also serves as the active sites trapping photogenerated electrons to facilitate H evolution. As a result, MoS-QDs/ZnInS exhibits high photocatalytic activity for H production, and the optimized 2 wt% MoS-QDs/ZnInS (2MoS-QDs/ZnInS) heterostructure exhibits the highest H evolution rate of 7152 umol·h·g under visible light, ∼9 times of pure ZnInS. Our strategy here could shed some lights on developing noble-metal free heterostructures for highly efficient photocatalytic H production.