1f:T496,Scalable and sustainable solar hydrogen production through photocatalytic water splitting requires highly active and stable earth-abundant co-catalysts to replace expensive and rare platinum. Here we employ density functional theory calculations to direct atomic-level exploration, design and fabrication of a MXene material, Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles, as a highly efficient co-catalyst. Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles are rationally integrated with cadmium sulfide via a hydrothermal strategy to induce a super high visible-light photocatalytic hydrogen production activity of 14,342 μmol h^-1g^-1 and an apparent quantum efficiency of 40.1% at 420 nm. This high performance arises from the favourable Fermi level position, electrical conductivity and hydrogen evolution capacity of Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles. Furthermore, Ti₃C₂ nanoparticles also serve as an efficient co-catalyst on ZnS or Zn_xCd_1-xS. This work demonstrates the potential of earth-abundant MXene family materials to construct numerous high performance and low-cost photocatalysts/photoelectrodes.20:T4c4,MXene, a new series of 2D material, has been steadily advancing its applications to a variety of fields, such as catalysis, supercapacitor, molecular separation, electromagnetic wave interference shielding. This work reports a carefully designed aqueous droplet light heating system along with a thorough mathematical procedure, which combined leads to a precise determination of internal light-to-heat conversion efficiency of a variety of nanomaterials. The internal light-to-heat conversion efficiency of MXene, more specifically Ti3C2, was measured to be 100%, indicating a perfect energy conversion. Furthermore, a self-floating MXene thin membrane was prepared by simple vacuum filtration and the membrane, in the presence of a rationally chosen heat barrier, produced a light-to-water-evaporation efficiency of 84% under one sun irradiation, which is among the state of art energy efficiency for similar photothermal evaporation system. The outstanding internal light-to-heat conversion efficiency and great light-to-water evaporation efficiency reported in this work suggest that MXene is a very promising light-to-heat conversion material and thus deserves more research attention toward practical applications.

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