Towards the prominent cocatalytic effect of ultra-small CoP particles anchored on g-C3N4 nanosheets for visible light driven photocatalytic H2 production

Abstract In this work, we prepared a series of novel quasi 0D/2D nanohybrids of CoP/g-C3N4 derived from the composites of Co3O4 quantum dots with g-C3N4 nanosheets. Particularly, 0.45 wt% CoP modified g-C3N4 had the highest H2 generation rate as 1.074 mmol·h−1 g−1 (AQY: 6.1% at 420 nm) under visible light irradiation, which was 283 and 5 times of that for pure g-C3N4 (0.0038 mmol·h−1 g−1) and 0.5 wt% Pt/g-C3N4 (0.216 mmol·h−1 g−1), respectively. The excellent performance was attributed to the formation of a new electron transfer route owing to the interaction of Co atoms with N atoms, the reaction sites of metal-like Co-P bonds due to the lower energy barrier than Pt toward H2 evolution, and finally the well dispersed CoP nanoparticles offering much more reaction sites than bulk counterpart. Our work provides a new methodology to construct highly dispersed noble metal free cocatalyst in the matrix of host photocatalyst with excellent performance.