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Relationship between the activity for photocatalytic H2O overall splitting (HOS) and the electron occupancy on dorbits of the active component in photocatalysts shows volcanic diagram, and specially the d10electronic configuration in valley bottom exhibits inert activity, which seriously fetters the development of catalytic materials with great potentials. Herein, In d10electronic configuration of In2O3was activated by phosphorus atoms replacing its lattice oxygen to regulate the collocation of the ascended In 5p-band (In ɛ5p) and descended O 2p-band (O ɛ2p) centers as efficient active sites for chemisorption to *OH and *H during forward HOS, respectively, along with a declined In 4d-band center (In ɛ4d) to inhibit its backward reaction. A stable STH efficiency of 2.23% under AM 1.5 G irradiation at 65 °C has been obtained over the activated d10electronic configuration with a lowered activation energy for H2evolution, verified by femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, in situdiffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy and theoretical calculations of dynamics. These findings devote to activating d10electronic configuration for resolving the reaction energy barrier and dynamical bottleneck of forward HOS, which expands the exploration of high-efficiency catalytic materials.

In2O3/Nb2O5S-scheme heterojunctions fabricated viaa one-step electrospinning technique enable intimate contact between two phases, fostering ultrafast interfacial electron transfer to prolong lifetimes and improve CO2photoreduction performance.

Li's group reported an epitaxial growth method to fabricate a well lattice-matched Mo2C-Mo2N heterostructure for efficient H2production though the promoted adsorption, activation and lowered reaction barrier in an explored electrocatalytic water vapor splitting device.

It is still a great challenge to effectively optimize the electronic structure of photocatalysts for the sustainable and efficient conversion of solar energy to H2energy. To resolve this issue, we report on the optimization of the electronic structure of hollow-concave carbon nitride (C3N4) by deviating the sp2-hybridized structure of its tri-s-triazine component from the two-dimensional plane. The embedded CuInS2into C3N4(CuInS2@C3N4) demonstrates an increased light-capturing capability and the promoted directional transfer of the charge carrier. Research results reveal that the hollow structure with an apparent potential difference between the concave and convex C3N4drives the directional transfer of the photoinduced electrons from the Cu 2porbital of CuInS2to the N 1sorbital of C3N4with the S-scheme principle. The H2evolution efficiency over CuInS2@C3N4is up to 373 µmol·h−1g−1under visible irradiation, which is 1.57 and 1.35 times higher than those over the bulk g-C3N4with 1 wt% Pt (238 µmol·h−1g−1) and g-C3N4with 3 wt% Pd (276 µmol·h−1g−1), respectively. This suggests that the apparent potential difference of the hollow C3N4results in an efficient reaction between the photogenerated electrons and H2O. This work supplies a new strategy for enhancing the sustainable solar conversion performance of carbon nitride, which can also be suitable for other semiconductors.