1e: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.1f: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.20:T4e3,Abstract Plasmonic metal nanoparticles are a category of plasmonic materials that can efficiently convert light into heat under illumination, which can be applied in the field of solar steam generation. Here, this study designs a novel type of plasmonic material, which is made by uniformly decorating fine metal nanoparticles into the 3D mesoporous matrix of natural wood (plasmonic wood). The plasmonic wood exhibits high light absorption ability (≈99%) over a broad wavelength range from 200 to 2500 nm due to the plasmonic effect of metal nanoparticles and the waveguide effect of microchannels in the wood matrix. The 3D mesoporous wood with numerous low‐tortuosity microchannels and nanochannels can transport water up from the bottom of the device effectively due to the capillary effect. As a result, the 3D aligned porous architecture can achieve a high solar conversion efficiency of 85% under ten‐sun illumination (10 kW m −2 ). The plasmonic wood also exhibits superior stability for solar steam generation, without any degradation after being evaluated for 144 h. Its high conversion efficiency and excellent cycling stability demonstrate the potential of newly developed plasmonic wood to solar energy‐based water desalination.

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