Interface engineering of organic-inorganic heterojunctions with enhanced charge transfer

Heterostructure materials are increasingly utilized in solar energy conversion to pursue high efficiency and longterm stability. The charge transfer across interfaces gives rise to major energy loss arising from non-ideal interfacial effects, i.e., high interfacial energy barrier and low interfacial contacting area. Herein, we demonstrate a facile interface engineering strategy to eliminate non-ideal interfacial effects. A heterojunction of CN@CP25 is constructed via polyphenol-assisted assembly of titania (P25) and carbon nitride (CN). The uniform dispersion of P25 on CN enlarges the interfacial contacting area of 3.2-fold compared with random dispersion, while the transformation of polyphenols into conjugated carbon facilitates the interfacial charge transfer by switching a 0.4 eV Schottky contact to a 0.1 eV Ohmic contact between CN and P25. A 2.5-fold enhancement of charge transfer flux is obtained with an initial reaction rate of 5185 mu mol h-1 g-1 for photocatalytic nicotinamide regeneration.