Morphology-engineered carbon quantum dots embedded on octahedral CdInS for enhanced photocatalytic activity towards pollutant degradation and hydrogen evolution.

In recent years, carbon quantum dots (CQDs) and CdInS have considered as the representatives of the most potential photocatalysts applied in the field of photocatalysis for efficiently solving energy shortage and environmental pollution. In this work, a novel CQDs hybridized CdInS (CQDs/CIS) heterostructure with 2D nanosheet/3D nanooctahedra morphology was successfully fabricated by a simple in-situ solvothermal method. Most interestingly, the morphology of hybrid gradually evolved from 3D octahedron to 2D nanosheet with the increase of CQDs. This unique 2D/3D structure and synergistic effect between CQDs and CdInS increased the multi-dimensional active reaction sites and enhanced the quantum yield and the separation efficiency of photogenerated electron pairs. Therefore, CQDs/CIS hybrids showed excellent photocatalytic activities of H generation, RhB and TCH degradation. Especially, CQDs/CIS-3 heterostructure presented the highest photocatalytic efficiency and its hydrogen generation activity (956.79 μmol g h was 7.57-fold improvement by contrast with pure CdInS (126.35 μmol g h. Moreover, RhB and TCH degradation rate constants of CQDs/CIS-3 were about 8.14 and 2.32 times higher than those of CdInS respectively. Furthermore, the effect of CQDs on the evolution of heterostructure morphology and photocatalytic mechanism were also proposed. This research work would offer useful enlightenment for elucidating the affect of CQDs on the morphology evolution and construction of CQDs-based hybrid with excellent performances for H production and pollutant removal.