Enhancing photocatalytic hydrogen production of g-C₃N₄ by selective deposition of Pt cocatalyst

Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) has been widely studied as a photocatalyst for the splitting of water to produce hydrogen. In order to solve the problems of limited number of active sites and serious recombination rate of charge-carriers, noble metals are needed as cocatalysts. Here, we selectively anchored Pt nanoparticles (NPs) to specific nitrogen species on the surface of g-C₃N₄ via heat treatment in argon–hydrogen gas mixture, thus achieving g-C₃N₄ photocatalyst anchored by highly dispersed homogeneous Pt NPs with the co-existed metallic Pt⁰ and Pt²⁺ species. The syner-gistic effect of highly dispersed metallic Pt⁰ and Pt²⁺ species makes the catalyst exhibit excellent pho-tocatalytic performance. Under the full-spectrum solar light irradiation, the photocatalytic hydrogen production rate of the photocatalyst is up to 18.67 mmol·g^{−1·h −1}, which is 5.1 times of the catalyst prepared by non-selective deposition of Pt NPs.