Microelectronic structure changes electron utilization: Core-shell structure catalysts with electron library and quantum dots for photocatalytic hydrogen production.

Photocatalysis is facing huge challenges especially the separation and efficient utilization of photocarriers. Herein, we report that a ternary hollow core-shell photocatalyst is synthesized by template and self-assembled method. The experimental results show that the electron separation efficiency and utilization efficiency are significantly improved, not only because the ternary hollow core-shell structure spatially separates the oxidation area MnOx from the reduction area Co-MOF, but also because lots of emergent electrons are stored in Co-MOF as an electronic library, contributing to the formation of surface polarization to support the requirement call from the CoP quantum dots (QDs) as active-sites. It's the first report that the effectively separated electron-rich and electron-poor microelectronic states of the tunable Co-MOF promotes electron utilization by affecting the storage capacity of the electron library promoting photocatalytic hydrogen production. The tests show that Mn@Cd-CoP QDs/MCN (35.31 mmol/h/g), Mn@Cd-CoP QDs/BCN (23.69 mmol/h/g) and Mn@Cd-CoP QDs (11.08 mmol/h/g) have the better hydrogen production performances, which is about 38 times, 26 times and 12 times higher than CdS (0.9244 mmol/h/g), respectively. The pioneering exploration about the ternary hollow core-shell structure bonded with MOFs materials with abundant CoP QDs will open up a new perspective to design high-performance for solar-chemical energy conversion.