Femtosecond time-resolved diffuse reflectance study on facet engineered charge-carrier dynamics in Ag3PO4 for antibiotics photodegradation

The contamination of antibiotics micro-pollutants in water bodies causes increasing concerns currently. Semiconductor-based photocatalysis has been considered as an efficient method for the removal of contaminations from aquatic environment, while its catalytic performance always depends on facets in semiconductor. To deeply understand the relation between facet and catalytic process, herein we take the different morphologies of Ag3PO4 as the cases to investigate the charge-carrier dynamics in different facets of Ag3PO4 for the photodegradation of antibiotic ciprofloxacin (CIP), sulfamethoxazole (SMX), and tetracycline (TC). The degradation results show that Ag3PO4 tetrahedrons with dominated {111} facets exhibit 1.83 times higher CIP degradation rate than Ag3PO4 cubes with dominated {100} facets. Femtosecond time-resolved diffuse reflectance (fs-TDR) spectroscopy is used to give the detail charge-carrier dynamics in different facets of Ag3PO4 in accordance with the antibiotics pollutants degradation rate, which provides a more direct and visual proof.