Surface plasmon mediates the visible light–responsive lithium–oxygen battery with Au nanoparticles on defective carbon nitride

Significance Deployment of electric vehicles with long driving ranges demands new electrochemistry beyond the current Li-ion batteries. Aprotic lithium–oxygen batteries have gained considerable attention and promise to provide energy density of approximately three to five times that of state-of-the-art Li-ion batteries, but they are plagued by sluggish reaction kinetics at cathodes and induced large-voltage hysteresis. A photo-mediated strategy has been attempted to reduce the discharge/charge overvoltage, but it is obstructed by the limited ultraviolet light absorption and the inevitably high carrier recombination on semiconductor photocathodes. Here, a plasmonic heterojunction of gold nanoparticle-decorated carbon nitride with nitrogen vacancies is used as a bifunctional catalyst to accelerate the oxygen cathode reactions of the lithium–oxygen battery under visible light.