One-step hydrothermal synthesis of S-defect-controlled ZnIn_(2)S_(4) microflowers with improved kinetics process of charge-carriers for photocatalytic H_(2) evolution

Engineering lattice defects in two-dimensional(2 D) sulfide semiconductors has been accepted as an effective strategy to enhance the efficiency of the solar-to-fuels conversion.Although many researches have proven the lattice defect-mediated photocatalytic activity of ZnIn_(2)S_(4),the artificial control of Sdefects for optimizing the charge-carrier kinetics process in ZnIn_(2)S_(4) has long been a challenging task.Herein,we report a facile one-step method to modulate the lattice S-content of ZnIn_(2)S_(4) microflowers(MFs) only through adjusting the used amount of S-precursor in the hydrothermal solution that contains the metal precursors with a fixed Zn/In stoichiometric ratio at 1:2.We also demonstrated that the Svacancies at the In facets were the main type of lattice defects in the formed ZnIn_(2)S_(4) MFs,which could enhance both the separation and migration processes of the photoinduced charge-carriers due to the existence of discrete defect energy-levels(DELs) and the reduced effective mass of electrons,as evidenced by the first-principles calculations and the electron spectra analyses.The ZnIn_(2)S_(4) MFs with the optimal content of S-vacancy obtained by a hydrothermal treatment of the precursors with the Zn/In/S stoichiometric ratio of 1:2:8 possessed the long-lived photoinduced electron(~94.64 ns) for contributing to the photo-physical and-chemical processes.Thus,upon visible light irradiation,the H_(2)-evolution rate of this sample reached ~2.40 mmol h^(-1) g^(-1) with an apparent quantum efficiency of ~0.16% at 420 nm even though only using 5 mg of photocatalysts without any cocatalysts.