Semiconductor Nanomaterials in Photocatalysis

Dear Colleagues,

With humanity facing the depletion of fossil fuel resources and associated climate change due to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the drive to achieve greater utilization of the Earth’s primary energy source, the sun, has taken on new urgency. Complex photocatalytic processes that harvest solar energy have evolved in nature, and researchers are now racing to catch up with numerous novel discoveries that aim to harness photons to drive chemical processes and achieve charge separation. Many semiconductor materials have band gap energies within the eV region, consistent with the maximum in the solar spectrum at sea level, making them ideal candidate photocatalysts as long as recombination of electron–hole pairs can be avoided. One way of achieving this is to extract charge from the semiconductor into acceptor moieties, small photoactive centers with high surface areas which are achieved with nanoparticles of semiconducting materials. This Special Edition aims to draw together key developments that will allow us to make better use of the only energy source that is guaranteed not to expire for another 5 billion years.

Dr. John Arron Stride
Guest Editor

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