Coral-shaped MoS₂ decorated with graphene quantum dots performing as a highly active electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction

We report a new CVD method to prepare coral-shaped monolayer MoS₂ with a large amount of exposed edge sites for catalyzing hydrogen evolution reaction. The electrocatalytic activities of the coral-shaped MoS₂ can be further enhanced by electronic band engineering via decorated with graphene quantum dot (GQD) decoration. Generally, GQDs improve the electrical conductivity of the MoS₂ electrocatalyst. First-principles calculations suggest that the coral MoS₂@GQD is a zero-gap material. The high electric conductivity and pronounced catalytically active sites give the hybrid catalyst outstanding electrocatalytic performance with a small onset overpotential of 95 mV and a low Tafel slope of 40 mV/dec as well as excellent long-term electrocatalytic stability. The present work provides a potential way to design two-dimensional hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts through controlling the shape and modulating the electric conductivity.