Promoting photoreduction properties via synergetic utilization between plasmonic effect and highly active facet of BiOCl

Exploring highly efficient photocatalysts is an urgent task for achieving efficient solar-to-chemical conversion. Plasmonic effect is widely used in improving the photocatalytic properties via reducing the activation barrier for chemical reactions, enhancing the absorption of the photocatalysts or injecting the hot carriers into the photocatalysts from the plasmon metals. In this work, we design BiOCl-Ag-E with Ag loaded on the edge side of BiOCl. This hybrid structure takes the advantages of highly photocatalytic active (001) facet of BiOCl and the plasmonic effect. The plasmon metal is proposed to provide the (001) facets with more photogenerated charge carriers driving by the internal electric field, which is convinced by the photocurrent response and the detection of active species. Due to the accumulation of more negative charge carriers on (001) facet, BiOCl-Ag-E presents outstanding waste-water cleaning and CO₂ photoreduction properties. The methodology of material design in this work paves the way for future design of efficient photocatalysts.