Abstract
Hydrogen is a green energy carrier with high enthalpy and zero environmental pollution emission characteristics. Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution (HER) is a sustainable and promising way to generate hydrogen. Despite of great achievements in photocatalytic HER research, its efficiency is still limited due to undesirable electron transfer loss, high HER over-potential and low stability of some photocatalysts, which lead to their unsatisfied performance in HER and anti-photocorrosion properties. In recent years, many spintronics works have shown their enhancing effects on photo-catalytic HER. For example, it was reported that spin polarized photo-electrons could result in higher photocurrents and HER turn-over frequency (up to 200%) in photocatalytic system. Two strategies have been developed for electron spin polarizing, which resort to heavy atom effect and magnetic induction respectively. Both theoretical and experimental studies show that controlling spin state of OH radicals in photocatalytic reaction can not only decrease OER over-potential (even to 0eV) of water splitting, but improve stability and charge lifetime of photocatalysts. A convenient strategy have been developed for aligning spin state of OH by utilizing chiral molecules to spin filter photo-electrons. By chiral-induced spin filtering, electron polarization can approach to 74%, which is significantly larger than some traditional transition metal devices. Those achievements demonstrate bright future of spintronics in enhancing photocatalytic HER, nevertheless, there is little work systematically reviewing and analysis this topic. This review focuses on recent achievements of spintronics in photocatalytic HER study, and systematically summarizes the related mechanisms and important strategies proposed. Besides, the challenges and developing trends of spintronics enhanced photo-catalytic HER research are discussed, expecting to comprehend and explore such interdisciplinary research in photocatalytic HER.
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