Hydrothermal Synthesis of Cubic Mesocrystal CeO₂ for Visible Photocatalytic Degradation of Rhodamine B

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Cubic mesocrystal $CeO_2$ was synthesized via a hydrothermal method with glutamic acid ($C_5H_9NO_4$) as a template. The XRD pattern of a calcined sample shows the face-centered cubic fluorite structure of ceria. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and the selected-area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern revealed that the submicron cubic mesocrystals were composed of many small crystals attached to each other with the same orientation. The UV-visible adsorption spectrum exhibited the red-shift phenomenon of mesocrystal $CeO_2$ compared to commercial $CeO_2$ particles; thus, the prepared materials show tremendous potential to degrade organic dyes under visible light illumination. With a concentration of a rhodamine B solution of 20 mg/L and a catalyst amount of 0.1 g/L, the reaction showed higher photocatalytic performance following irradiation with a xenon lamp (${\geq}380nm$). The decoloring rate can exceed 100% after 300 min.