Construction of defect-rich 1T-MoS2 towards efficient electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution: Recent advances and future perspectives

Recently, it has been an urgent research topic to develop an efficient and cheap catalyst to replace Pt-based materials and achieve efficient hydrogen production through electrochemical water splitting. As a promising non-noble metal material theoretically, MoS2 has been widely studied on how to improve its hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance as much as possible experimentally. Previous studies showed that converting MoS2 from 2H to 1T phase and manufacturing defects are two common ways which could enhance its HER activity. However, there are only a few works reporting the combination of the two advantages of 1T phase and defect structure for MoS2-based HER catalysts. Hence, in this review, we particularly summarized the recent progress related to the synthesis of defect-rich 1T-MoS2 materials and the corresponding catalytic application in HER. Besides, some advanced characterization methods to obtain crystal phase and defect information of MoS2 have also been introduced. Finally, summary and outlook about the challenge and the future research direction of defect-rich 1T-MoS2 based materials towards efficient HER are highlighted.