context: To obtain strong immobilization and fast conversion kinetics for polysulfides, the concept of constructing highly adsorptive and catalyzing heterostructures has been widely developed, such as TiN–TiO2, MoN–VN, and WS2–WO3. In fact, the anchoring of polysulfides as well as Li2S precipitation are part of a continuous multielectron redox reaction in a working battery, and thus an integrated platform, such as 1T MoS2 NDs in this work, enabling smooth “immobilization–diffusion–conversion” is highly appealing. The unique advantages for 1T MoS2 ND can be summarized as following: (i) the edge-rich NDs with an intrinsically strong affinity to polysulfides serve as anchoring sites for LPSs and accelerate their reduction, which contributes to the long cycle life and high sulfur utilization; (ii) the highly conductive and catalytic nature of 1T MoS2 NDs uniformly loaded on conductive substrates can facilitate Li–S reaction kinetics (Fig. S14, ESI†) and reduce the cell resistance, which benefits the high rate performance of MoS2 ND-modified cathodes; (iii) the well-defined morphology and phase of MoS2 maximize the active sites to fully demonstrate their potential for Li–S chemistry, which enables a boost of the electrochemical performance with a small amount of electrochemical inert catalysts. In addition, post-mortem analyses revealed that MoS2 NDs/porous carbon remained stable after cycling (Fig. S15, ESI†). To further determine whether the excellent catalytic performance of the MoS2 NDs could be retained during long-term cycling, the MoS2 ND/porous carbon/Li2S6 cathode was prolonged to 500 cycles at 0.5C (Fig. S16, ESI†), and exhibited only a low capacity fading rate of 0.08% per cycle, directly indicating the stability of the MoS2 NDs as a catalyst in long-term Li–S batteries. Finally, thanks to the facile fabrication method and the low content needed to improve LSB performance, the large-scale application of 1T MoS2 NDs in high-energy LSBs should not be problematic.
answer: MoS2 ND-modified