An efficient visible-light photocatalyst made from a nonpolar layered semiconductor by grafting electron-withdrawing organic molecules to its surface

Benyan Xu; Yang An; Yuanyuan Liu; Baibiao Huang; Xiaoyan Qin; Xiaoyang Zhang; Ying Dai; Myung-Hwan Whangbo

doi:10.1039/c6cc07849d

An efficient visible-light photocatalyst made from a nonpolar layered semiconductor by grafting electron-withdrawing organic molecules to its surface

Chem Commun (Camb). 2016 Nov 10;52(92):13507-13510. doi: 10.1039/c6cc07849d.

Authors

Benyan Xu¹, Yang An¹, Yuanyuan Liu¹, Baibiao Huang¹, Xiaoyan Qin¹, Xiaoyang Zhang¹, Ying Dai², Myung-Hwan Whangbo³

Affiliations

¹ State key of Crystal Materials, Shandong University, Shandong 250100, P. R. China. [email protected] [email protected].
² School of Physics, Shandong University, Shandong 250100, P. R. China.
³ Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8204, USA.

PMID: 27803947
DOI: 10.1039/c6cc07849d

Abstract

A nonpolar inorganic layered semiconductor becomes an efficient visible-light photocatalyst when its surface layer becomes polar by chemically attaching electron-withdrawing 4-substituted thiophenolates ^-S-C₆H₄Z (Z = NO₂, COOH, Cl, Br, H, CH₃, NH₂) via Bi-S bonds. An in-depth study finds a correlation between the apparent rate constant (k_app) and the Hammett constants σ_para of the 4-substituted groups.