Viewpoint pubs.acs.org/JPCC
What is “New Physical Insight” in Surface Photocatalytic Water Splitting? “New Physical Insight” is the most important criteria for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. The exact meaning, however, sometimes is not so obvious. I would like to use a specific problem on the topic of photocatalytic water splitting on oxide surfaces to illustrate what is exactly the meaning of New Physical Insight in my opinion. Since Fujishima and Honda discovered photocatalytic water splitting on TiO2 electrode in electrochemical cell,1 photocatalysis of water has become a hot research topic in photocatalysis because of its importance in clean hydrogen production. Many experimental studies of water photocatalytic splitting have been performed on materials related to TiO2. In many of these studies, however, researchers have used methanol as a sacrificial agent, in addition to water, to produce hydrogen. So, a legitimate question to ask is where the hydrogen product comes from in a mixed water/methanol sample in photocatalysis. Are they coming purely from water or methanol, or both? Even though there have been many experimental studies on this topic, this important physical insight remains not fully answered. J. Phys. Chem. is certainly interested in publishing those research works that try to understand the fundamental mechanisms of water and methanol photocatalysis on various materials, such as metal oxides. In my opinion, research works that measure hydrogen production efficiencies of different materialswithout any insightare more suitable for other journals. A useful question to ask yourself before submitting your paper to J. Phys. Chem. is “has my paper provided sufficient new physical insight into an interesting and/or important scientific problem?”. Of course, not every paper is a clear-cut case. If authors do have questions about your paper’s suitability for J. Phys. Chem., we editors are certainly very happy to provide expert advices.
Xueming Yang,* Senior Editor
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State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The author declares no competing financial interest. This Viewpoint is jointly published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A and C.
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REFERENCES
(1) Fujushima, A.; Honda, K. Electrochemical Photolysis of Water at a Semiconductor Electrode. Nature 1972, 238, 37 DOI: 10.1038/ 238037a0.
Published: December 28, 2017 © 2017 American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b11308 J. Phys. Chem. C 2017, 121, 28211−28211
