Title: Heterostructure Photocatalysts: An Avenue for Full Solar Spectrum Employment for Efficient Photocatalysis
Abstract: Increasing industrial pollution has led to deteriorating airand water quality. There is a need to find sustainable and efficient means todegrade complex organic pollutants. Semiconductor photocatalysts are able touse solar light to produce reactive oxygen species that are able to help breakdown these organic pollutants into simple molecules like CO2 and H2O.Complete utilization of solar light in the photocatalytic reaction is ofimmense importance for efficient conversion of solar light. Although Visibleand IR light constitutes almost 90% of the solar energy, there are very fewefforts towards its effective utilization in photocatalysis. The difficulty ofthe usage of Visible and IR is its associated low energetic photons, which canlead to exciton generation only for low band-gap semiconducting systems, whichis sometimes not enough to initiate photocatalytic process. Moreover, thesetypes of systems have very fast charge recombination process. Assembling aheterojunction semiconductor photocatalysts is found to be an efficient meansof harvesting a major part of the solar spectrum.