The discovery was made in the lab of Kenton Whitmire, a Rice University professor of chemistry, with assistance from researchers at the University of Houston.
They found that growing a layer of an active catalyst directly on the surface of a light-absorbing nanorod array produced an artificial photosynthesis material that could split water at the full theoretical potential of the light-absorbing semiconductor with sunlight.
Finding a clean renewable source of hydrogen fuel is already the focus of research, but the technology is yet to be commercialised but one promising method is through an oxygen-evolution catalyst that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.