Highly Ordered N-Doped Carbon Dots Photosensitizer on Metal–Organic Framework-Decorated ZnO Nanotubes for Improved Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

In spite of having several advantages such as low cost, high chemical stability, and environmentally safe and benign synthetic as well as operational procedures, the full potential of carbon dots (CDs) are yet to be explored as photosensitizers due to the challenges associated with the fabrication of well-arrayed CDs with any other photocatalytic heterostructures. In the present study, a unique combination of Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) decorated Zinc Oxide (ZnO) one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures as host and CDs as guest species have been explored on account of its potential applications in photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting performance. Our synthetic strategy to incorporate well-defined nitrogen-doped carbon dots (N-CDs) array onto zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) anchored on ZnO 1D nanostructures allows a facile unification of different components which subsequently plays a decisive role in improving the material’s PEC water splitting performance. Simple extension of such strategies is expected to offer significant advantages for the preparation of CDs-based heterostructures for photo(electro)catalytic and other related applications.