Highly Ordered Nitrogen-Rich Mesoporous Carbon Nitrides and Their Superior Performance for Sensing and Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation

Mesoporous carbon nitrides (MCN) are fascinating materials with unique semiconducting and basic properties that are useful in many applications including photocatalysis and sensing. Most syntheses of MCN focus on creating theoretically predicted C3N4 stoichiometry with a band gap of 2.7 eV using a nano-hard templating approach with triazine-based precursors. However, the performance of the MCN in semiconducting applications is limited to the MCN framework with a small band gap, which would be linked with the addition of more N in the CN framework, but this remains a huge challenge. Here, we report a precursor with high nitrogen content, 3-amino-1,2,4-triazole, that enables the formation of new and well-ordered 3D MCN with C3N5 stoichiometry (MCN-8), which has not been predicted so far, and a low-band-gap energy (2.2 eV). This novel class of material without addition of any dopants shows not only a superior photocatalytic water-splitting performance with a total of 801 μmol of H2 under visible-light irradiation for 3 h but also excellent sensing properties for toxic acids.