Abstract
Photosynthesis of H2O2 under sunlight is a sustainable method; however, most developed photocatalysts utilize limited near-infrared light, which accounts for 52% of the solar spectrum. In typical near-infrared photocatalysts, excited electrons fall into low-energy sub-gap states, reducing the driving force for H2O2 generation. Here, a polydopamine-loaded porphyrin supramolecular photocatalyst efficiently utilizes near-infrared light for H2O2 production from H2O and O2, achieving an apparent quantum yield of 2.8% at 1020 nm. This substantial near-infrared utilization significantly boosts activity under full-spectrum irradiation, with an H2O2 generation rate of 3.37 mM/h and solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 2.2%. Persistent semiquinone radicals in polydopamine are demonstrated to enable ultrafast sub-gap electron transfer (ca. 79 fs) from porphyrin to polydopamine and facilitate near-infrared-driven •OOH radical generation, thereby accelerating H2O2 production. This study sheds light on the potential of near-infrared-responsive photocatalysts and offers insights into optimizing their performance for sustainable H2O2 synthesis.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available within the main text and its Supplementary Information. Atomic coordinates of the optimized computational models of PDA/SA-TCPP are available in Supplementary Data 1. Source data are provided in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
C. Pan acknowledged the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22476071, 22172065), the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (E2024210028), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20201345).
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S.D. conducted the experiments and performance evaluation. Y.N.Z. performed DFT calculations and analysis of the TAS data. J.X. and Y.Z. performed data analysis. J.Z., Y.D., and Y.L. participated in the paper discussions and interpretation of the results. Y.F.Z. supervised the project. C.P. wrote the manuscript with critical revision from all authors.
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Dou, S., Zhang, Y., Xu, J. et al. Persistent semiquinone radicals enable efficient near-infrared-driven H2O2 photosynthesis. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70130-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70130-x
