A general strategy for hydrophobic 2D Ti₃C₂MXene membrane fabrication for efficient and stable solar desalination.

A novel and elegant hydrophilic/hydrophobic nanoporous double layer structure was designed and developed for efficient long-term water desalination. It contained a hydrophobic salt-resistant hierarchical layer of well-defined Cu₂SnSe₃ (or Cu₂ZnSnSe₄) nanosphere arrays for broad solar harvesting and water vapor evaporation, and a hydrophilic filter membrane for continuous water supply and vapor generation. The as-fabricated self-floatable devices achieve remarkable solar water evaporation performances (average evaporation rate: 1.657 kg m⁻² h⁻¹ and solar thermal conversion efficiency: 86.6% under one sun) with super stability for water distillation from seawater and wastewater containing organic dyes, heavy metals and bacteria.

Recent advanced salt-blocking technologies for solar-driven interfacial desalination systems have been summarized.

With the increasing demand for near-infrared (NIR) detection in the fields of automation, military industry, communications and medical health, how to develop novel high quality and low cost NIR photodetectors has become a research hotspot in recent years.

Photocatalytic CO ₂ reduction utilizes solar radiation as the main energy source to convert CO ₂ into clean chemical fuels, providing an alternative fuel for human production and life activities.

Indium phosphide quantum dots (InP QDs) are nontoxic nanomaterials with potential applications in photocatalytic and optoelectronic fields. Post-synthetic treatments of InP QDs are known to be essential for improving their photoluminescence quantum efficiencies (PLQEs) and device performances, but the mechanisms remain poorly understood. Herein, by applying ultrafast transient absorption and photoluminescence spectroscopies, we systematically investigate the dynamics of photogenerated carriers in InP QDs and how they are affected by two common passivation methods: HF treatment and the growth of a heterostructure shell (ZnS in this study). The HF treatment is found to improve the PLQE up to 16–20% by removing an intrinsic fast hole trapping channel (τ_h,non = 3.4 ± 1 ns) in the untreated InP QDs while having little effect on the band-edge electron decay dynamics (τ_e = 26–32 ns). The growth of the ZnS shell, on the other hand, is shown to improve the PLQE up to 35–40% by passivating both electron and hole traps in InP QDs, resulting in both a long-lived band-edge electron (τ_e > 120 ns) and slower hole trapping lifetime (τ_h,non > 45 ns). Furthermore, both the untreated and the HF-treated InP QDs have short biexciton lifetimes (τ_xx ∼ 1.2 ± 0.2 ps). The growth of an ultra-thin ZnS shell (∼0.2 nm), on the other hand, can significantly extend the biexciton lifetime of InP QDs to 20 ± 2 ps, making it a passivation scheme that can improve both the single and multiple exciton lifetimes. Based on these results, we discuss the possible trap-assisted Auger processes in InP QDs, highlighting the particular importance of trap passivation for reducing the Auger recombination loss in InP QDs.