Electronic structure engineering of BaTiO3 cuboctahedrons by doping copper to enhance the photocatalytic activity for environmental remediation

The advent of perovskites as an efficient photocatalyst has paved the way to newer possibilities in the degradation of contaminants such as dyes and toxic heavy metal ions. The alleged poor photocatalyst BaTiO3 was engineered to perform better by decreasing its bandgap to make it visible light active via doping. The high-risk factor in the reduction of the bandgap is the formation of recombination centers for the charge carriers which decreases the efficiency of the photocatalyst. Herein, we studied the electronic structure tuning of BaTiO3 by doping copper and developed a one pot synthesis method to obtain copper doped BaTiO3 that has a high surface area, lower recombination rate, and higher photocatalytic efficiency towards dye degradation and hexavalent chromium ion reduction. The 0.5 CuBT sample had a photocatalytic efficiency of 99.4 % for methyl violet decomposition within 120 min and 99.8 % for hexavalent chromium ion reduction by fructose in 20 min.