Topic: Microstructure Engineering of Advanced Photocatalytic Materials for Energy and Environmental Applications

The pursuit of carbon neutrality, clean energy utilization, and environmental sustainability has stimulated unprecedented interest in photocatalytic technologies. Over the past decades, tremendous progress has been achieved in developing semiconductor photocatalysts for applications ranging from solar fuel production and carbon dioxide reduction to water purification, air pollution control, and selective chemical synthesis. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of photocatalysis is still hindered by fundamental challenges, including insufficient solar energy utilization, inefficient charge separation, limited active-site accessibility, sluggish surface reaction kinetics, and poor long-term stability.

Microstructure engineering has emerged as a central paradigm for overcoming these limitations. By tailoring the structural and electronic characteristics of photocatalytic materials from the atomic to the mesoscale, researchers can precisely regulate light harvesting, exciton generation and dissociation, charge transport, interfacial reaction pathways, and catalytic selectivity. Recent advances in defect engineering, crystal facet modulation, heterointerface construction, strain engineering, single-atom catalysis, hierarchical architecture design, and operando characterization have significantly expanded our understanding of the structure–activity relationship in photocatalytic systems and opened new opportunities for designing highly efficient photocatalysts.

This Special Issue aims to showcase the latest advances in the rational microstructure engineering of photocatalytic materials for sustainable energy and environmental applications. We particularly welcome contributions that combine innovative material design with advanced characterization, theoretical calculations, and mechanistic investigations to establish clear correlations between microstructure, electronic structure, excited-state dynamics, and photocatalytic performance. Interdisciplinary studies integrating materials science, catalysis, chemistry, physics, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence are especially encouraged.

We invite original research articles, communications, reviews, and perspectives covering, but not limited to, the following topics:

* Atomic-scale and nanoscale microstructure engineering of photocatalysts

* Defect, vacancy, and dopant regulation

* Crystal facet, morphology, and phase engineering

* Heterojunctions, interface engineering, and built-in electric fields

* Single-atom and dual-atom photocatalysts

* Exciton dynamics and charge carrier regulation

* Electronic structure and band structure engineering

* Carbon nitride-, oxide-, sulfide-, nitride-, carbide-, MOF-, COF-, and MXene-based photocatalysts

* Photocatalytic water splitting and hydrogen evolution

* CO₂ photoreduction and solar fuel production

* Nitrogen fixation and selective photocatalytic synthesis

* Photocatalytic degradation of emerging contaminants

* Air purification and NOx/VOC photocatalytic removal

* Photo-assisted advanced oxidation processes (Photo-AOPs)

* In situ/operando characterization and ultrafast spectroscopy

* Density functional theory, multiscale simulations, and AI-assisted catalyst design

* Scalable synthesis and practical photocatalytic applications

By bringing together cutting-edge contributions from researchers across disciplines, this Special Issue seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of emerging strategies in microstructure engineering and to inspire the development of next-generation photocatalytic materials for sustainable energy conversion and environmental remediation.

Photocatalysis； Microstructure Engineering； Interface Engineering； Solar Energy Conversion