Hierarchical Self-Assembly of Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Nanosheets to Construct Tubular Superstructures for Photocatalytic Degradation

The fabrication of hybrid assemblies into highly ordered functional materials remains a major challenge. Here, two carbazole derivatives equipped with an alkyl thiol and Br-substituted (CZBr) or unsubstituted (CZH) were designed. These molecules were hybridized with an SnS2 nanosheet, and an organic-induced multistep self-assembly approach was successfully applied in the CZBr and SnS2 systems. First, the CZBr was anchored on SnS2 nanosheets via the alkyl thiols' chemical bonding. Then, the strong pi-pi interaction of CZBr drove the hybrid nanosheets to stack as superstructures. The nanoflower morphology of SnS2 could thus be converted to a nanotube of the SnS2-CZBr hybrid material. Due to this unique structure, the as-prepared organic-inorganic hybrid materials exhibit excellent efficiency for the photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange (MO). The best degradation effect of SnS2-CZBr after 1 h of illumination was 93.48%; the value was 53.78% for SnS2. The photocatalysts described here are a class of organic-driven hierarchical self-assembly organic-inorganic hybrid semiconductor materials.