Plasmonic Enhancement in Water Splitting Performance for NiFe Layered Double Hydroxide-N₁₀ TC MXene Heterojunction

MXene-based material has attracted wide attention due to its tunable band gap, high conductivity and impressive optical and plasmonic properties. Herein, a hetero-nanostructured water splitting system was developed based on N-doped Ti₃ C₂ (N₁₀ TC) MXene and NiFe layered double hydroxide (LDH) nanosheets. The oxygen evolution reaction performance of the NiFe-LDH significantly enhanced to approximately 8.8-fold after incorporation of N₁₀ TC. Meanwhile, the Tafel slope was only 58.1 mV dec^-1 with light irradiation, which is lower than pure NiFe-LDH nanosheets (76.9 mV dec^-1 ). All results manifested the vital role of the N₁₀ TC MXene induced plasmonic hot carriers via electrophoto-excitation in enhancing the full water splitting performance of the as-prepared system. This work is expected to provide a platform for designing various plasmonic MXenes-based heterogeneous structures for highly efficient catalytic applications.