Spatially Engineered Ternary Schottky/S-Scheme Heterojunctions for Artificial Photosynthesis.

Photocatalytic CO reduction into solar fuels presents a promising strategy for carbon mitigation and sustainable energy conversion. However, single-component photocatalysts suffer from inefficient charge separation, while binary heterojunctions-even with cocatalysts assistance-often undergo rapid Coulombic recombination due to timescale mismatches between ultrafast charge transfer and slower surface reaction kinetics. To overcome these limitations, a spatially engineered NbC/NbO/ZnO ternary heterostructure is developed by anchoring ZnO quantum dots (QDs) onto NbO nanorods grown in situ from NbC MXene.