Photo-catalytic activity of Zn 1-x Mn x S nanocrystals synthesized by wet chemical technique
- PDF / 501,032 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 595.28 x 793.7 pts Page_size
- 28 Downloads / 165 Views
NANO EXPRESS
Open Access
Photo-catalytic activity of Zn1-xMnxS nanocrystals synthesized by wet chemical technique Mansi Chitkara1, Karamjit Singh2*, Inderjeet Singh Sandhu1 and Harbhajan Singh Bhatti2
Abstract Polyvinyl pyrrolidone capped Zn1-xMnxS (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.1) nanocrystals have been synthesized using wet chemical coprecipitation method. Crystallographic and morphological characterization of the synthesized materials have been done using X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscope. Crystallographic studies show the zinc blende crystals having average crystallite size approx. 3 nm, which is almost similar to the average particle size calculated from electron micrographs. Atomic absorption spectrometer has been used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of synthesized nanomaterials. Photo-catalytic activity has been studied using methylene blue dye as a test contaminant. Energy resolved luminescence spectra have been recorded for the detailed description of radiative and non-radiative recombination mechanisms. Photo-catalytic activity dependence on dopant concentration and luminescence quantum yield has been studied in detail. Introduction Environmental pollution, toxic water pollutants, and industrialization on a global scale have drawn attention for sustained fundamental and applied research in the area of environmental remediation. The increased public concern with environmental pollutants has prompted the need to develop novel treatment methods [1] where photo-catalysis is gaining a lot of attention in the field of pollutant degradation. Semiconductor photo-catalysts offer the potential for complete elimination of toxic chemicals through their efficiency and potentially broad applicability [2,3]. Recently, semiconductor nanocrystals have attracted great attention due to their size tunable physical and chemical properties. Transition from bulk to nanoparticles lead to the display of quantum mechanical properties and an increased dominance of surface atoms, which give rise to unique photo-physical and photo-catalytic properties of nanomaterials, for example, with the decrease of particle size, extremely high surface to volume ratio is obtained leading to an increase in surface specific active sites for chemical reactions and photon absorption to enhance the reaction and absorption efficiency. The enhanced surface to volume ratio causes increase of surface states, which changes the activity of electrons and holes, affecting the chemical * Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Department of Physics, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab 147 002, India Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
reaction dynamics. The size quantization increases the bandgap of photo-catalysts to enhance the redox potential of conduction band electrons and valence band holes [4]. Various new compounds and materials for photo-catalysis have been synthesized in the past few decades [5-13]. Semiconductor photo-catalysts, with a primary focus on TiO2 [14-17], have been applied to variety
Data Loading...
