Fabrication of carbon-coated 0D/3D MoS2/ZIS core-shell hybrid structure with enhanced photocatalytic H2-evolution from water splitting

The highly-effective separation of photo-generated charge carriers was extremely important during photocatalysis process. Therefore, in this study, we reported a novel hybrid photocatalytic structure composed of carbon coated 0D MoS2 nanoparticles decorated onto 3D heretical ZnIn2S4 microflowers (MoS2/ZIS@C). The hetero-interface of MoS2/ZIS and the coated carbon shell could facilitate the separation and transfer of photo-excited electron-hole pairs and exhibited an outstanding photocatalytic H2-evolution rate of 2448.9 μmol·g−1·h−1. The uniformly distributed MoS2 nanoparticles onto could act as active sites for H2 production and the coated carbon shell could successfully improve the stability during photocatalysis procedure. The potential mechanism of MoS2/ZIS@C was also postulated to understand the contributions made by hetero-interface and core-shell structure in charge transfer. We hope this work could offer new design for core-shell ZnIn2S4-based hybrid structure in highly efficient photocatalytic H2 evolution reactions.