The synthesis of a novel Ag-NaTaO3 hybrid with plasmonic photocatalytic activity under visible-light

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.