Highly efficient charge transfer from small-sized cadmium sulfide nanosheets to large-scale nitrogen-doped carbon for visible-light dominated hydrogen evolution

[Display omitted] •Large-sized amorphous carbon nitrides as cocatalysts.•Ultra-thin CdS nanosheets as photocatalysts.•High efficient visible-light dominated H2 yield.•Fast charge separation between CdS and amorphous carbon nitrides. Slow charge transfer and carrier recombination are key issues in photocatalytic reactions. The current solution is to load small-sized cocatalysts onto large-sized photocatalysts. Here a new strategy is proposed. Small-sized photocatalysts of cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanosheets are grown onto large-sized cocatalysts of N-doped amorphous carbon (a-CN) to construct CdS @ a-CN photocatalysts. Photoluminescence spectra and transient photocurrent demonstrate that optimized CdS @ a-CN shows effective charge separation compared with CdS. The corresponding photocatalytic H2 yield of optimized CdS @ a-CN is ∼244 μmol, which is 3.6 times higher than that of CdS. Besides, the hydrogen yield for CdS under visible-light irradiation is significantly improved from ∼44 μmol to ∼217 μmol for the optimized CdS @ a-CN. Our design strategy provides an effective way to construct photocatalytic systems with outstanding photocatalytic performance.