Engineering sulfur vacancies in basal plane of MoS2 for enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction

Engineering sulfur vacancies in the basal plane of MoS 2 is an effective method to enhance its catalytic activity. However, the traditional methods are only effective for multilayer or monolayer MoS 2 supported on the substrate (such as Si/SiO wafer or carbon paper), which are not applied in bulk or commercial MoS 2 . In this work, we developed a simple and general chemical reduction method for engineering S-vacancies in the MoS 2 basal plane and additional active edge sites, which can be exploited to improve the HER catalytic performance of MoS 2 . The optimized MoS 2 nanosheets with S-vacancies exhibit excellent HER activity with a small overpotential of 190 mV at large density of 10 mA/cm 2 and a low Tafel slope of 54 mV decade −1 . Moreover, prominent electrochemical durability was also achieved. This finding proposes an effective strategy to fabricating S-vacancies for activating basal plane of 2D transition metal chalcogenides materials.