EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Due to the ongoing global warming and the upcoming energy crises, the exploitation of alternative, renewable energy sources has become a major focus of materials chemistry. The ultimate solution for sustainable energy lies in the concept of solar fuels – commodity chemicals that can be generated from nothing but sunlight and abundant feedstock through heterogeneous photocatalysis. The reactions of water splitting and carbon dioxide photoreduction, however, involve complex multi-electron redox processes that require a rational design of the surface catalytic sites. When working with ill-defined inorganic surfaces, these sites are inevitably hard to study and understand on a truly fundamental level, which limits the rational synthesis of active and selective photocatalyst.

In this contribution, I will address this challenge and introduce a novel approach that merges traits of heterogeneous and homogeneous photocatalysis. I will discuss it in light of several particular systems developed in my group.