Synergism of tellurium-rich structure and amorphization of NiTe1+x nanodots for efficient photocatalytic H2-evolution of TiO2

ABSTRACT The exploitation and design of novel low-cost cocatalysts with rich H2-evolution active centers is quite crucial for markedly promoting the photocatalytic activity. Herein, tellurium-rich amorphous NiTe1+x nanodots as a novel and robust H2-generation cocatalyst were ingeniously loaded onto the TiO2 to greatly improve its photocatalytic H2-evoluton performance via a synergistic strategy of tellurium-rich structure and amorphization, with an aim of maximally exposing more H2-evolution site of tellurium atoms. In this case, tellurium-rich amorphous NiTe1+x nanodots were very small (0.3–1 nm) and uniformly modified onto the TiO2 by the facile photoinduced synthesis route, and the resultant a-NiTe1+x/TiO2(0.5 wt%) achieves the highest H2-evolution rate (3302 μmol h−1 g−1, AQE = 15.8 %). The superior activity can be attributed to the successful deposition of tellurium-rich amorphous NiTe1+x nanodots, which can not only efficiently enhance the photoinduced electron migrate from TiO2, but also supply abundant active tellurium sites to accelerate the interfacial H2-evolution process. Significantly, the tellurium-rich a-NiTe1+x can also be utilized as the universal cocatalyst. This research may provide new avenues to develop efficient and low-cost cocatalysts with abundant enriched active-sites for high performance photocatalysts.