A recent elegant approach that combines both strategies
mentioned before has been recently reported.3,10 They describe
the photogeneration of hydrogen in water by employing
semiconductor CdSe nanocrystals as light harvesting materials,
12−14 with the subsequent electron transfer to a nickel
catalyst for the concomitant reduction of protons to hydrogen.
Further examples of molecular approaches using quantum dots
(abbreviated as “QD”) as photosensitizers in pure water involve
the use of hydrogenases and their functional mimics.2,9,15−18
Yet, although the catalytic activity of some of these examples is
remarkably high (up to hundreds of thousands of turnover
numbers), the reported quantum yields are still below 40%
even when using monochromatic light. In this context, a deeper
knowledge of the kinetics of both charge transfer and bond
formation/breaking are the keys to understand the limitations
of photodriven hydrogen evolving systems based on molecular
approaches.19−21 Herein, we take advantage of a highly active
system composed of QDs and a cobalt molecular catalyst to
study the kinetics involved in the overall photo-induced
catalytic process. We selected the components based on the
following requirements: (1) a light harvesting unit that absorbs
in the visible light region; (2) a molecular water reduction
catalyst with a well-defined structure; and (3) the whole system
has to work in purely aqueous conditions.
Water-soluble CdTe QDs are excellent photosensitizing
candidates as they have high extinction coefficients and offer
the intrinsic advantages of semiconductor-based nanocrystals
such as high photoluminescence quantum yields and quantum
confinement effects.12−14 As catalyst, we selected the macrocyclic
cobalt complex Co(III)-1 in Chart 1 because of its great
stability and activity for hydrogen production in water.22,23 Our
results show that the catalytic activity of Co(III)-1 is superior to
that of the cobaloxime-type catalyst Co(III)-2, that has also
been used as proton reduction catalyst in water (Chart 1).24 An
aqueous equimolar mixture of ascorbic acid/sodium ascorbate
(H2A/NaHA) was chosen as both buffer and sacrificial electron
donor to trap the photogenerated holes in the CdTe QDs.
A detailed study of the thermodynamics and kinetics of the
system based on the components depicted in Chart 1 has
allowed us to build a complete energetics−kinetics scheme of
the proton reduction catalysis and identify what are the major
advantages and limitations in this kind of photodriven
hydrogen evolution processes.