Chemical strategies in molybdenum based chalcogenides nanostructures for photocatalysis

Abstract

Since the last two decades, plenty of environmental issues have risen up due to the damage which humans have caused to the planet for the sake of development. The continual ignorance of global climate change and the stalemate approach of major oil producing industries led to the catastrophic melting of glaciers in Arctic and Antarctica and very recently the highest mountain peak of Sweden have become 24 m shorter which is the evident outcome of climatic disturbance. The chaotic unbalancing in the reservoirs of natural resources is leading us to the several crisis which has a potential to affect the livelihood. Among the various techniques used for the development of sustainable energy, photocatalysis is regarded as one of the simplest technique which can yield enormous amount of energy by the utilization of solar energy for meeting the world's demand of an energy requirement and which can be exploited in the degradation of toxic pollutants i.e. organic as well as inorganic pollutants for environment remediation. Transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs) have a potential to get adsorb easily and be utilized for solving the energy-related problems. Large number of photocatalysts has been fabricated, among them Molybdenum (Mo) chalcogenides nanostructures, which also belong to the class of TMCs exhibit exceptional properties such as non-toxicity, low cost and structural flexibility which give them edge over the other materials. Furthermore, the tunable band gap of Mo chalcogenides nanostructures makes them the promising candidates for efficient hydrogen evolution via photocatalytic water splitting in the visible light illumination. This review deals with the photocatalytic applications of Mo based chalcogenides nanostructures in efficient hydrogen production via water splitting and degradation of dyes. It also discusses the recent developments in fabricating Molybdenum chalcogenides nanostructures, their role in the photocatalytic water splitting and discusses the efforts which have been made to improve their photocatalytic activity for extending their applications to the scalable point.