Letter

Enhanced Ferroelectric-Nanocrystal-Based Hybrid Photocatalysis by Ultrasonic-Wave-Generated Piezophototronic Effect

State Key Laboratory of Crystal Materials, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China
Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China
§ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, United States
School of Material Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332−0245, United States
Nano Lett., 2015, 15 (4), pp 2372–2379
DOI: 10.1021/nl504630j
Publication Date (Web): March 24, 2015
Copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society

Abstract

Abstract Image

An electric field built inside a crystal was proposed to enhance photoinduced carrier separation for improving photocatalytic property of semiconductor photocatalysts. However, a static built-in electric field can easily be saturated by the free carriers due to electrostatic screening, and the enhancement of photocatalysis, thus, is halted. To overcome this problem, here, we propose sonophotocatalysis based on a new hybrid photocatalyst, which combines ferroelectric nanocrystals (BaTiO3) and semiconductor nanoparticles (Ag2O) to form an Ag2O–BaTiO3 hybrid photocatalyst. Under periodic ultrasonic excitation, a spontaneous polarization potential of BaTiO3 nanocrystals in responding to ultrasonic wave can act as alternating built-in electric field to separate photoinduced carriers incessantly, which can significantly enhance the photocatalytic activity and cyclic performance of the Ag2O–BaTiO3 hybrid structure. The piezoelectric effect combined with photoelectric conversion realizes an ultrasonic-wave-driven piezophototronic process in the hybrid photocatalyst, which is the fundamental of sonophotocatalysis.

Supporting Information


Additional information and figures, including experimental details, piezoelectric responses of BaTiO3 nanocube and control experiments. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.

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Received 2 December 2014
Published online 24 March 2015
Published in print 8 April 2015
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