Semiconductor vacancy engineering has remained a prominent growing field over the past several decades. Modulating electronic structures and surface properties has sparked considerable interest in vacancy-modified photocatalysts. Given vacancy-mediated photocatalysis has only been developed for a relatively short period, significant advance has been made in enhancing light absorption over the full solar spectrum, the efficiency of charge transfer and separation and surface reaction kinetics. This review seeks to highlight the recent impressive progress in vacancy-enhanced photocatalysis. First, we summarize the crafting and characterization of vacancies after defining the classification of vacancies. Second, current developments of semiconductor vacancy engineering in several photocatalysts (i.e., metal oxides, hydroxides, sulfides, Sillén phase related bismuth-containing materials and g-C₃N₄) are emphasized, focusing on the mechanism of vacancies in regulating the photocatalytic performance. Finally, prospects and challenges regarding vacancy engineering of photocatalytic materials are concluded.

Recent advances in exfoliation techniques of layered and non-layered materials for energy conversion and storage are summarized.

Herein, to provide ideas for the design of highly selective CO₂ reduction materials, we introduce each step of the photocatalytic CO₂ reduction process and summarize how each step is adjusted to promote the selectivity of CO₂ reduction.

The ability to synthetically tune the size, shape, composition and architecture of inorganic nanostructures offers enormous opportunities to explore the fundamental structure–property relationships that occur uniquely at the nanoscale, and engineer greater functionality and design complexity into new material systems. Core/shell nanoparticles represent an important class of nanostructured materials that have garnered considerable interest. The success in producing core/shell nanoparticles with strictly controlled core diameter and shell thickness and tailoring their material properties relies crucially on the epitaxial growth of the shell material over the highly curved surface of the spherical core. However, effective methods to yield such high-quality core/shell nanoparticles are comparatively few and limited in scope. Here, we develop a robust nonepitaxial growth strategy to create uniform plasmonic/semiconducting core/shell nanoparticles with precisely controlled dimensions by capitalizing on amphiphilic star-like triblock copolymers as nanoreactors. The diameter of the plasmonic core and the thickness of the semiconductor shell can be independently and precisely regulated by tailoring the molecular weights (i.e., the lengths) of the inner and intermediate blocks of star-like triblock copolymers, respectively. The successful crafting of plasmonic/semiconducting core/shell nanoparticles was corroborated by the composition and structural characterizations. These functional nanoparticles exhibited largely improved photocatalytic activities, which can be attributed to the localized surface plasmon-mediated light harvesting enhancement of the plasmonic core and the built-in internal electric field. This nonepitaxial growth strategy offers new levels of tailorability in the dimensions, compositions and architectures of nanomaterials with engineered functionalities for applications in catalytic, electronic, optic, optoelectronic and sensory materials and devices.