Proceedings of MATSUS23 & Sustainable Technology Forum València (STECH23) (MATSUS23)
Publication date: 22nd December 2022
The prevailing global energy crisis calls for searching viable pathways for generating green hydrogen as an alternative energy resource. Dye-sensitized photocatalytic water splitting is a feasible solution to produce green hydrogen. However, identifying suitable catalysts has been one of the bottlenecks in driving dye-sensitized photocatalysis efficiently. In this work, we report a new class of electrocatalysts based on the layered Weyl semimetals MIrTe4 (M = Nb, Ta) for the Eosin Y (EY)-sensitized hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under visible light illumination. NbIrTe4 and TaIrTe4 exhibit HER activities of ~ 18000 and ~ 14000 µmol g-1, respectively after 10 h of irridation with visible light. MIrTe4 (M = Nb, Ta) outperforms related catalysts including transition metal dichalcogenides and other Weyl semimetals in terms of HER activity using EY as photosensitizer and triethanolamine as the sacrificial agent. We hypothesize that the combination of topologically non-trivial surface states and metal d-band density near the Fermi surface in MIrTe4 are the driving forces for their high catalytic performance.
B.V.L. and M. S. acknowledge support by the Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST) and the Cluster of Excellence e-conversion (Grant No. EXC2089). M.S. thanks Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers.