Concaving Agl sub-microparticles for enhanced photocatalysis

Concave particles represent a new class of structures with their surfaces curving in or hollowed inward and thus presence of regions with negative curvatures. Owing to the potential high-index facets and negative curvatures, crystalline particles with concave surfaces are expected to show unexplored or substantially enhanced performance in comparison with the counterpart particles with convex surfaces. In this report, we highlight a facile approach for the first-time synthesis of concave Agl nanoparticles through a controlled etching of spherical Agl particles in a solution containing ethylenediamine, absolute alcohol, and polyvinylpyrrolidone. Physical parameters including morphology and size of the resulting concave Agl particles can be tuned by carefully controlling the reaction conditions such as the amount of precursors and the injection rate of precursor solutions. Most importantly, the concave Agl particles exhibit a much higher efficiency towards photocatalytic degradation of organic molecules than the corresponding spherical Agl particles. The as-synthesized concave Agl particles are expected to be useful not only for the fundamental investigation on shape- and composition-dependent properties but also for potential applications in photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photonics, etc. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.