Selective Deposition of Silver Oxide on Single-Domain Ferroelectric Nanoplates and Their Efficient Visible-Light Photoactivity

Fang Chen; Zhaohui Ren; Siyu Gong; Xiang Li; Ge Shen; Gaorong Han

doi:10.1002/chem.201601456

Selective Deposition of Silver Oxide on Single-Domain Ferroelectric Nanoplates and Their Efficient Visible-Light Photoactivity

Chemistry. 2016 Aug 16;22(34):12160-5. doi: 10.1002/chem.201601456. Epub 2016 Jul 19.

Authors

Fang Chen¹, Zhaohui Ren^{2

2}, Siyu Gong¹, Xiang Li¹, Ge Shen¹, Gaorong Han¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Cyrus Tang Center for Sensor Materials and Application, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, P. R. China.
² State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Cyrus Tang Center for Sensor Materials and Application, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, P. R. China. renzh@zju.edu.cn.

PMID: 27430192
DOI: 10.1002/chem.201601456

Abstract

In this work, single-crystal and single-domain PbTiO3 nanoplates are employed as substrates to prepare Ag2 O/PbTiO3 composite materials through a photodeposition method. It is revealed that silver oxide nanocrystals with an average size of 63 nm are selectively deposited on the positive polar surface of the ferroelectric substrate. The possible mechanism leading to the formation of silver oxide is that silver ions are first reduced to silver and then oxidized by oxygen generation. The composite shows an efficient photodegradation performance towards rhodamine B (RhB) and methyl orange (MO) under visible-light irradiation. Such highly efficient photoactivity can be attributed to the ferroelectric polarization effect of the substrate, which promotes the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes at the interface.

Keywords: ferroelectric polarization; photocatalysis; selective growth; silver oxide; surface chemistry.