Dynamic structural twist in metal-organic frameworks enhances solar overall water splitting.

Photocatalytic overall water splitting holds great promise for solar-to-hydrogen conversion. Maintaining charge separation is a major challenge but is key to unlocking this potential. Here we discovered a metal-organic framework (MOF) that shows suppressed charge recombination.

Charge redistribution of a spatially differentiated ferroelectric BiTiO single crystal for photocatalytic overall water splitting.

Artificial photosynthesis is a promising approach to produce clean fuels via renewable solar energy. However, it is practically constrained by two issues of slow photogenerated carrier migration and rapid electron/hole recombination. It is also a challenge to achieve a 2:1 ratio of H and O for overall water splitting.

New Alkalescent Electrolyte Chemistry for Zinc-Ferricyanide Flow Battery.

Alkaline zinc-ferricyanide flow batteries are efficiency and economical as energy storage solutions. However, they suffer from low energy density and short calendar life. The strongly alkaline conditions (3 mol L OH) reduce the solubility of ferri/ferro-cyanide (normally only 0.

Bio-inspired Two-dimensional Nanofluidic Ionic Transistor for Neuromorphic Signal Processing.

Voltage-gated ion channels prevalent in neurons play important roles in generating action potential and information transmission by responding to transmembrane potential. Fabricating bio-inspired ionic transistors with ions as charge carriers will be crucial for realizing neuro-inspired devices and brain-liking computing. Here, we reported a two-dimensional nanofluidic ionic transistor based on a MXene membrane with sub-1 nm interlayer channels.

Determining the Transformation Kinetics of Water Oxidation Intermediates on Hematite Photoanode.

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) from water is a sequential oxidation reaction process, involved in transformation of multiple reaction intermediates. For photo(electro)catalytic OER, revealing the intermediates transformation kinetics is quite challenging due to its coupling with photogenerated charge dynamics. Herein, we specifically study the transformation kinetics of the OER intermediates in rationally thin hematite photoanodes through increasing the ratio between surface intermediates and photogenerated charges in bulk.

Visualizing the role of applied voltage in non-metal electrocatalysts.

Understanding how applied voltage drives the electrocatalytic reaction at the nanoscale is a fundamental scientific problem, particularly in non-metallic electrocatalysts, due to their low intrinsic carrier concentration. Herein, using monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS) as a model system of non-metallic catalyst, the potential drops across the basal plane of MoS (ΔV) and the electric double layer (ΔV) are decoupled quantitatively as a function of applied voltage through surface potential microscopy. We visualize the evolution of the band structure under liquid conditions and clarify the process of E keeping moving deep into E, revealing the formation process of the electrolyte gating effect.

Alkene-Linked Covalent Organic Frameworks Boosting Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution by Efficient Charge Separation and Transfer in the Presence of Sacrificial Electron Donors.

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are potential photocatalysts for artificial photosynthesis but they are much less explored for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution (PHE). COFs, while intriguing due to crystallinity, tunability, and porosity, tend to have low apparent quantum efficiency (AQE) and little is explored on atomistic structure-performance correlation. Here, adopting triphenylbenzene knots and phenyl linkers as a proof of concept, three structurally related COFs with different linkages are constructed to achieve a tunable COF platform and probe the effect of the linkage chemistry on PHE.