The synthesis of a novel Ag–NaTaO3 hybrid with plasmonic photocatalytic activity under visible-light
Abstract
In this work, a visible-light-driven plasmonic Ag–NaTaO3 nanocomposite photocatalyst is prepared by a photochemical reduction process. The structure analyses of the Ag–NaTaO3 reveal that the Ag nanoparticles (5–10 nm) are uniformly loaded on the surface of the cube NaTaO3 nanocrystals. The plasmonic Ag–NaTaO3 nanocomposite showed an enhanced photocatalytic activity for the degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) under visible-light irradiation. In particular, the Ag–NaTaO3 nanocomposite shows the highest photocatalytic activity at the nominal atomic ratio of silver to tantalum as 0.6, which is more than 3 times that of pure NaTaO3. The enhancement of the photocatalytic activity was attributed to the effective charge transfer from the plasmon-excited Ag nanoparticles to NaTaO3, which suppresses the charge recombination during the photocatalytic process. This work may provide a new insight into the design and preparation of the advanced NaTaO3-based visible-light photocatalytic materials.