Bridging Effect of S-C Bond for Boosting Electron Transfer over Cubic Hollow CoS/g-CN Heterojunction toward Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production.

The construction of interfacial effects and chemical bonds between catalysts is one of the effective strategies to facilitate photogenerated electron transfer. A novel hollow cubic CoS is derived from Co-ZIF-9 and the S-C bond is successfully constructed between CoS and g-CN. The S-C bond acts as a bridge for electronic transmission, allowing the rapid transmission of photoelectron to hydrogen evolution active site in CoS. In addition, the results of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy show that the S-C bond acts as a bridge to quickly transfer photogenerated carriers in the composite material, and achieves the effect of high-efficiency hydrogen evolution. The hydrogen production of SgZ-45 reaches 9545 μmol·g in 5 h, which is 53 and 12 times that of g-CN and ZIF-9, respectively. The intrinsic mechanism of photoelectron transfer through S-C bonds can be further confirmed by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This work provides new insights for building a chemical bond electron transfer bridge between MOF derivatives and nonmetallic photocatalytic materials.