Piezoelectric polarization induced by dual piezoelectric materials ZnO nanosheets/MoS heterostructure for enhancing photoelectrochemical water splitting.

Zinc oxide (ZnO) has a broad range of applications in piezo-photoelectrochemical water splitting. However, the narrow light absorption range and high photogenerated carrier recombination efficiency make ZnO somewhat limited in applying piezo-photoelectrochemical water splitting. Heterogeneous structure construction is a superior handle to these two drawbacks.

Photonic spin-selective perfect absorptance on planar metasurfaces driven by chiral quasi-bound states in the continuum.

Optical metasurfaces with high-quality-factor resonances and selective chirality simultaneously are desired for nanophotonics. Here, an all-dielectric planar chiral metasurface is theoretically proposed and numerically proved to support the astonishing symmetry-protected bound state in the continuum (BIC), due to the preserved π rotational symmetry around the axis and up-down mirror symmetry simultaneously. Importantly, such BIC is a vortex polarization singularity enclosed by elliptical eigenstate polarizations with non-vanishing helicity, owing to the broken in-plane mirror symmetry.

Copper phosphide decorated g-CN catalysts for highly efficient photocatalytic H evolution.

Designing functional heterojunctions to enhance photocatalytic hydrogen evolution is still a key challenge in the field of efficient solar energy utilization. Copper phosphides become an ideal material to serve as the cocatalysts during photocatalytic hydrogen evolution by virtue of the lower prices. In this study, we synthesized graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) based catalysts loaded with copper phosphide (CuP, CuP), which exhibit superior performance in photocatalytic H evolution.