Nanosheets assembling three-dimensional molybdenum disulfide nanospheres for efficient hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract In this study, uniform MoS2 nanosheets assembling three-dimensional (3D) nanospheres (MoS2 NPs) are developed via a facile hydrothermal procedure with silica (SiO2) nanospheres as a template. The MoS2 NPs catalyst exhibits high hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance with low onset overpotential of 87.0 mV, and small Tafel slope of 48.8 mV dec-1, which also exhibits excellent stability even after 30 h potential cycles. The superior HER activity is attributed to the unique 3D hierarchical structure, which provides enriched active edge sites and excellent electrical transport.