Preparation, Characterization, Photocatalytic, Sensing and Antimicrobial Studies of Calotropis gigantea Leaf Extract Capped CuS NPs by a Green Approach

In this work, copper sulfide nanoparticles (CuS NPs) were synthesized using Calotropis gigantea leaf extract by adopting the sonochemical method, using a green approach. X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared, UV-Vis DRS, fluorescence, thermal gravimetric analysis and zeta potential analyzers were used to characterize the synthesized CuS NPs. The photocatalytic degradation of safranin O (SO) dye revealed that the prepared CuS NPs exhibited efficient photocatalytic performance on sunlight irradiation. The degradation of dye in the absence and presence of catalyst was 6.44 and 80.53% in 60 min respectively. Moreover, the photodegradation of dye, when studied with reference to the amount of catalyst from 10 to 50 mg/L was found to be optimized. The SO dye was degraded sharply on the usage of 50 mg/L of the catalyst. The CuS NPs was employed as a sensor for the determination of various heavy metal ions using a fluorescence spectrophotometer and produced satisfactory results. The synthesized samples were screened for antibacterial and antifungal activities against selected bacterial and fungal strains with marked results. Graphical Abstract [GRAPHICS] .