Sol–gel synthesis of erbium-doped ZnO with nest structure for photocatalysis

Rare earth erbium-doped ZnO samples were synthesized via a facile sol-gel method. The influences of Er-doping on structural properties, morphological features and optical properties were characterized by XRD, BET, SEM and UV-Vis DRS techniques. The results showed that the as-synthesized products were well crystallined in the absence of impurity phases and Er-doping resulted in the reduction of bandgap energy deducted from the UV-Vis DRS results. Amongst the samples, layer-like 0.5% Er-doped ZnO with nest structure achieved the highest photodegradation (90.7%) of methylene blue (MB) after UV light irradiation for 2 h. The kinetic studies of MB degradation over different Er-doped ZnO were also conducted and proved to obey the pseudo-first-order kinetics.