Highly Tunable Heterojunctions from Multimetallic Sulfide Nanoparticles and Silver Nanowires

Abstract

A facile and general strategy is presented to create well-defined heterojunctions with ultra-small multimetallic sulfide nanoparticles (MMSNPs) uniformly coated on sliver nanowires. A unique aspect of this method is the atomic-level pre-integration of multimetallic components by exploiting recently developed supertetrahedral metal sulfide nanoclusters. The use of such nanoclusters also enables the convenient formation of the ultrathin interfacial Ag₂ S layer via etching. The heterojunctions (denoted as MMSNPs/Ag₂ S/Ag-NWs) benefit from adjustable multimetallic components and display tunable visible-light-driven photocatalytic performance owing to the synergistic effect of multimetallic components from MMSNPs and the high carrier mobility of Ag-NWs. The synthetic strategy opens new routes to designing and fabricating various heterojunctions with multimetallic components, which could further expand their applications in catalysis, electronics, and photonics.

Keywords: heterojunctions; multimetallic sulfide; nanoclusters; photocatalysis; silver nanowires.