Edge sites regulation, strain and electric field effect on MoS2/CoS2 heterojunction catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction

Heterojunction catalysts in the field of hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) from electrocatalytic water splitting have recently become a hot research topic. In this paper, we systematically calculated the HER catalytic performance of a MoS2/CoS2 heterojunction for the first time, considering the effect of edge sites regulation, strain and electric field. The results indicate that the MoS2/CoS2 heterojunction exhibits synergistic catalytic performance compared to MoS2 and CoS2, the HER catalytic activity of which can be improved by exposing more edge sites or regulating the S content on the edges, with an optimized ratio of 25%. Surprisingly, applying strain has a slight effect on the catalytic activity of the edge, however, an obvious effect on the basal plane. For example, applying 2% tensile strain on the MoS2/CoS2 heterojunction can improve the edge catalytic performance by 13%, and for the basal plane, this value can reach 92%. In this case, the catalytic performance of the basal plane is better than that of the edge with 2% and without strain. Since the basal plane accounts for the majority of the two-dimensional catalysts, the catalytic performance of the basal plane is generally much lower than that of the edge. This discovery is of great significance, which means by adjusting strain, the catalytic performance of the heterojunction catalyst is likely to be improved by orders of magnitude. Moreover, considering the actual experimental process, we also calculated the effect of the electric field and found that 0.7 V/Å electric field can enhance the HER catalytic activity of the MoS2/CoS2 heterojunction by 23%.