Interfacial Interactions between Co‐Based Cocatalysts and Semiconducting Light Absorbers for Solar‐Light‐Driven Redox Reactions

Abstract

Solar‐light‐driven redox reactions, such as water splitting for hydrogen and oxygen evolution, and CO2 reduction, have recently shown great promise toward solar‐to‐fuel conversion. Herein, the recent achievements in establishing interfacial interactions between cocatalysts and semiconducting light absorbers to improve the efficiency of these reactions are focused on. Four kinds of interactions are summarized to clarify the accelerated photogenerated charge carrier kinetics, thereby resulting in enhanced activity of these redox reactions. Especially, the coordination interaction formed by chemical linkage seems to be more preferred because of a well‐provided tunnel for charge transfer. The extended applications of these interfacial interactions to other challenging reactions, such as N2 fixation and organic synthesis, are also predicted.

Synergy between Confined Cobalt Centers and Oxygen Defects on α‐Fe2O3 Platelets for Efficient Photocatalytic CO2 Reduction

“…[7][8][9] Notable, photocatalytic CO 2 reduction can be significantly ignited by cocatalysts via reducing the energy barriers to the targeted products and facilitating the charge transfer processes. [10][11][12] Recently, transition-metal-based cocatalysts, such as the oxide, sulfide, and phosphide, have been intensively explored as alternatives to noble-metal catalysts for CO 2 photoreduction due to the excellent intrinsic catalytic activity and low cost. [13][14][15][16] However, because of the limited active sites that are accessible to the reactants, these kinds of cocatalysts usually exhibit rather low atom utilization efficiency.…”