Constructing extrinsic oxygen vacancy on the surface of photocatalyst as CO_(2)and electrons reservoirs to improve photocatalytic CO_(2)reduction activity

Constructing own oxygen vacancies in the photocatalysts is a very promising method to improve their photocatalytic CO_(2)reduction activity.However,some catalysts have excellent stabilities,making it difficult for them to construct their own oxygen vacancies.To simplify the above difficulty of stable photocatalysts,constructing extrinsic oxygen vacancies on their surface as a novel idea is proposed.Here,a stable TiO_(2)nanosheet is chosen as a research object,we uniformly deposited BiOCl quantum dots on their surface via a simple adsorption-deposition method.It is found that BiOCl quantum dots are able to simultaneously self-transform into defective BiOCl with many oxygen vacancies when the photocatalyst is performed photocatalytic CO_(2)reduction.These extrinsic oxygen vacancies can act as“CO_(2)and photo-generated electrons reservoirs”to improve CO_(2)capture and accelerate the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes.For the above reasons,the modified TiO_(2)showed obvious enhancement of photocatalytic CO_(2)reduction compared to pristine TiO_(2)and BiOCl.This work may open a new avenue to broaden the use of oxygen vacancies in the process of photocatalytic CO_(2)reduction.