A general strategy via photoelectrocatalytic oxygen reduction for generating singlet oxygen with carbon bridged carbon-nitride electrode

With the ever-growing demand of clean water for the healthy world, water purification has become an urgent global issue. Singlet oxygen ( 1 O 2 ) as unique non-radical derivative of oxygen, possessing unoccupied π * orbital and exhibiting high selectivity towards electron-rich organic pollutants. Nevertheless, most of the approaches suffer from low-efficiency or biotoxicity, which severely restrict their potential applications. Therefore, in this work, we propose a general strategy via photoelectrocatalytic for selectively reducing oxygen to 1 O 2 with designed carbon bridged carbon nitride (CBCN). This work highlights the important role of synergistic photo-electro-catalytic effect for selectively generating the 1 O 2 via oxygen reduction pathway, which can be a promising way especially for degrading electron-rich pollutants. A novel strategy for selectively generating singlet oxygen is proposed for complete removal of electron-rich organic pollutants in photoelectrocatalytic oxygen reduction process.