Ultrafast Condensation of Carbon Nitride on Electrodes with Exceptional Boosted Photocurrent and Electrochemiluminescence

Abstract

Semiconducting polymeric carbon nitride (CN) has drawn wide attention ranging from photocatalysis to more recent biosensing owing to unique defect‐tolerated optoelectronic properties and being metal‐free, cheap, and highly stable. However, at the core of electrical–optical interconversion, the preparation of the CN photoelectrode is still challenging. Now, the growth of CN on electrodes is achieved simply by microwave‐assisted condensation in seconds. The ultrafast heating not only addressed the thermodynamic contradiction of precursor volatilization during polymerization but also led to strongly adhesive CN layer on electrodes with gradient carbon‐rich texture, greatly accelerating the electron–hole separation and mobility. Consequently, the CN photoelectrode exhibited a remarkable photocurrent and a record cathodic efficiency of electrochemiluminescence up to 7 times that of benchmark Ru(bpy)3Cl2 in aqueous solution.

Point‐Defect Engineering: Leveraging Imperfections in Graphitic Carbon Nitride (g‐C3N4) Photocatalysts toward Artificial Photosynthesis

“…[5,[28][29][30][31] On top of the mainstream use as a photocatalyst, carbon nitride also has some other applications such as in the field of biotechnology, biosensing and in optical and photoelectronic devices. [32][33][34][35] However, pristine g-C 3 N 4 still suffers from small specific surface area (10-15 m 2 g −1 ), poor light absorption at longer wavelengths, low charge migration rate and a high recombination rate of photogenerated electronhole pairs, leading to unsatisfactory photocatalytic performance in real practices. [1,24,36,37] In order to surmount these shortcomings of g-C 3 N 4 , research on nanostructure engineering, copolymerization, crystal-structure engineering and heterostructure construction have been conducted in an effort to boost light absorption and charge separation efficiency of g-C 3 N 4 .…”

Revealing Crystallization‐Induced Blue‐Shift Emission of a Di‐Boron Complex by Enhanced Photoluminescence and Electrochemiluminescence

“…One facile method capable of comparing the viability of a luminophore in both solution and solid state is studying the electrochemiluminescence or electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL). [6] This is an elegant light emitting process that capitalizes on the luminophores redox properties, with which nanomaterials, quantum dots, metal clusters and various molecules have been investigated. [7] Its practical applications are seen in bioanalytical immunoassays and in light emitting diodes.…”

Universal Electrochemical Synthesis of Mesoporous Chalcogenide Semiconductors: Mesoporous CdSe and CdTe Thin Films for Optoelectronic Applications

“…Recently, carbon nitride also has attracted great interest due to its outstanding optical performance, such as photoluminescence (PL) and electrochemiluminescence [15, 16] . Especially, its nanosheets distinctively enhance PL performance [17] . Thus, several types of recently developed nanoarchitectures have demonstrated superior performance in a wide range of applications.…”