Development of renewable fuels from solar light appears as one of the main current challenges in energy science. A plethora of photocatalysts have been investigated to obtain hydrogen and oxygen from water and solar light in the last decades. However, the photon-to-hydrogen molecule conversion is still far from allowing real implementation of solar fuels. Here we show that 111 facet-oriented gold nanoplatelets on multilayer graphene films deposited on quartz is a highly active photocatalyst for simulated sunlight overall water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen in the absence of sacrificial electron donors, achieving hydrogen production rate of 1.2 mol_H2 per g_composite per h. This photocatalytic activity arises from the gold preferential orientation and the strong gold–graphene interaction occurring in the composite system.

Nature Communications 7, Article number: 11819 doi:10.1038/ncomms11819
Received 20 January 2016 Accepted 03 May 2016 Published 06 June 2016

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160606/ncomms11819/full/ncomms11819.html