Novel construction of carbon bonds in CeO2@C with efficiently photocatalytic activity

The recombination of photoinduced electron-hole pairs is the bottleneck problem of photocatalytic technique. In order to solve this problem, a novel CeO2@C composite was synthesized using acid dye as carbon resource to construct carbon bonds in this study. The results of photocatalytic degradation show that the photocatalytic activity of the synthesized CeO2@C was greatly enhanced due to the formation of enormous carbon bonds in the resulted catalysts, resulting in efficient separation of photoinduced electron-hole pairs. It is important to note that the photodegration efficiency of the catalyst in this study is much higher than that of other ceria based carbon catalysts such as CeO2@activated carbon, CeO2@graphene because the carbon obtained from the decomposition of acid dyes is good for the construction of carbon bonds in the carbon based materials compared with activated carbon and graphene. Furthermore, the adsorption capability of our synthesized catalyst is much higher than that of CeO2@activated carbon due to the formation of more hydroxyl groups, which is also helpful for the improvement of photocatalytic efficiency.