Recent advances of non-noble metals based plasma materials in photocatalysis

Localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) is a highly promising approach to improve the photocatalytic performance. Noble metal nanoparticles (NPs) with LSPR characteristics have drawn widespread interest in photocatalysis. However, the high cost and low reserves of precious metals greatly limit their further practical applications. Recently, great attention has been shifted to low-cost and abundant non-precious metal-based plasma (NMP) materials. NMP usually shows similar LSPR characteristics to precious metals and even better performance in some cases. The LSPR effects of NMP are beneficial for local field enhancement, plasma-induced resonance energy transfer, hot electron injection, photothermal effect, which play important roles in improving photocatalytic activity. Herein, the recent development of photocatalytic applications of NMP-based materials (including metal NPs and semiconductors) is summarized, including photocatalytic hydrogen evolution (PHE) from water splitting, photocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction (PCR), photocatalytic nitrogen reduction (PNR), PHE from ammonia borane (AB), photocatalytic pollutants degradation, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), photothermal therapy, sensing or upconversion luminescence (UCL) and other photocatalytic reactions (such as ethanol dehydrogenation and so on). This review outlined the current advances and challenges of NMP-based materials for photocatalysis, which is expected to guide the design of NMP-related materials for solar energy conversion.