Boosted Photocatalytic Activities of AgCrO through Eu-Doping Process.

AgCrO is a representative member of a family of Ag-containing semiconductors with highly efficient visible-light-driven responsive photocatalysts. The doping process with Eu is known to effectively tune their properties, thus opening opportunities for investigations and application. Here, we report the enhancement of the photocatalytic activity and stability of AgCrO by introducing Eucations.

Back to the Basics: Probing the Role of Surfaces in the Experimentally Observed Morphological Evolution of ZnO.

Although the physics and chemistry of materials are driven by exposed surfaces in the morphology, they are fleeting, making them inherently challenging to study experimentally. The rational design of their morphology and delivery in a synthesis process remains complex because of the numerous kinetic parameters that involve the effective shocks of atoms or clusters, which end up leading to the formation of different morphologies. Herein, we combined functional density theory calculations of the surface energies of ZnO and the Wulff construction to develop a simple computational model capable of predicting its available morphologies in an attempt to guide the search for images obtained by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM).