Heterostructured plasmonic LaB6/TiO2 nanoparticles with enhanced photocatalytic degradation toward environmental remediation

Plasmonic lanthanum hexaborides hybrid with semiconducting TiO2 to form heterostructure is regard as an effective strategy to enhance the photocatalytic activity by local surface plasmonic resonance effect. In this work, we firstly present the plasmonic lanthanum hexaboride are coupled with TiO2 to fabricate the LaB6@TiO2 heterostructures via a simple sol-gel approach. Thanks to the excellent electron conductivity and local surface plasmonic resonance effect of LaB6, the optimized 5 wt%-LaB6@TiO2 heterostructures shows an enhancement in the photocatalytic degradation of both of rhodamine B and tetracycline. Specifically, the degradation efficiency of these two pollutants (20 mg/L) reaches to 95% and 92%, which are much greater than the degradation efficiency of pristine TiO2 and commercial TiO2 (P25), indicating that plasmonic LaB6 as co-catalysts effectively improve the electron-hole separation. Therefore, the plasmonic LaB6 assisted LaB6@TiO2 heterostructures with enhanced photocatalytic activity should have potential application for effective degradation of organic dyes and antibiotics.