General Colloidal Synthesis of Transition-Metal Disulfide Nanomaterials as Electrocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

The material-efficient monolayers of transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a promising class of ultrathin nanomaterials with properties ranging from insulating through semiconducting to metallic, opening a wide variety of their potential applications from catalysis and energy storage to optoelectronics, spintronics, and valleytronics. In particular, TMDs have a great potential as emerging inexpensive alternatives to noble metal-based catalysts in electrochemical hydrogen evolution. Herein, we report a straightforward, low-cost, and general colloidal synthesis of various 2D transition-metal disulfide nanomaterials, such as MoS2, WS2, NiSx, FeSx, and VS2, in the absence of organic ligands. This new preparation route provides many benefits including relatively mild reaction conditions, high reproducibility, high yields, easy upscaling, no post-thermal annealing/treatment steps to enhance the catalytic activity, and, finally, especially for molybdenum disulfide nanosheets, high activity in the hydrogen evolution reaction. To underline the universal application of the synthesis, we prepared mixed CoxMo1-xS2 nanosheets in one step to optimize the catalytic activity of pure undoped MoS2, which resulted in an enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction performance characterized by onset potentials as low as 134 mV and small Tafel slopes of 55 mV/dec