Scalable and sustainable solar hydrogen production through photocatalytic water splitting requires highly active and stable earth-abundant co-catalysts to replace expensive and rare platinum. Here we employ density functional theory calculations to direct atomic-level exploration, design and fabrication of a MXene material, Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles, as a highly efficient co-catalyst. Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles are rationally integrated with cadmium sulfide via a hydrothermal strategy to induce a super high visible-light photocatalytic hydrogen production activity of 14,342 μmol h⁻¹g⁻¹ and an apparent quantum efficiency of 40.1% at 420 nm. This high performance arises from the favourable Fermi level position, electrical conductivity and hydrogen evolution capacity of Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles. Furthermore, Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles also serve as an efficient co-catalyst on ZnS or Zn_xCd_1−xS. This work demonstrates the potential of earth-abundant MXene family materials to construct numerous high performance and low-cost photocatalysts/photoelectrodes.

Porous P-doped g-C ₃ N ₄ nanosheets prepared by combining P doping and thermal exfoliation exhibit a high visible-light photocatalytic H ₂ -production activity of 1596 μmol h ⁻¹ g ⁻¹ and a quantum efficiency of 3.56% at 420 nm.