Fabrication and Characterization of Visible-Light-Driven Plasmonic Photocatalyst Ag/AgCl/TiO 2 Nanotube Arrays

Conventional TiO2 photocatalyst possesses excellent activities and stabilities, but requires near-ultraviolet (UV) irradiation (about 4% of the solar spectrum) for effective photocatalysis, thereby severely limiting its practical application. It is highly desirable to develop a photocatalyst that can use visible light in high efficiency under sunlight irradiation. In this work, we prepare new visible-light-driven plasmonic photocatalyst Ag/AgCl/TiO2 nanotube arrays (NTs) by depositing AgCl nanoparticles (NPs) into the self-organized TiO2 NTs, and then reducing partial Ag+ ions in the surface region of the AgCl particles to Ag0 species under xenon lamp irradiation. The prepared metal−semiconductor nanocomposite…