Tailoring photocatalytic nanostructures for sustainable hydrogen production

Photocatalysis is an important component for achieving sustainability in chemical transformations. It requires light absorption by a semiconductor and efficient extraction of the photogenerated electron-hole pairs to chemically active sites. One of the main problems in photocatalytic materials is to avoid electron-hole recombination following excitation. Tailored nanostructures offer a new way for achieving this goal by facilitating electron-hole separation. Nanoscaling of materials offers additional opportunities to generate unique photocatalysts that demonstrated novel light absorption, thermodynamic and kinetic properties. In this feature article we highlight some recent approaches towards the preparation of materials and nanostructures that showed improved activity for the sustainable production of hydrogen. This reaction has received much attention for the supply of future demand both for chemical industry and energy-related applications.