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Defect-induced optical and electrochemical properties of Pr2Sn2O7 nanoparticles enhanced by Bi3+ doping

  • 2D and Nanomaterials
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Abstract

Materials that show superior light-emitting and catalytic properties are in high demand among the scientific community owing to their applications in the areas of optoelectronics and (opto)electrocatalysis. In this work, we have synthesized sub-10-nm Pr2Sn2O7 (PSO) and Pr2Sn2O7:Bi3+ (PSOB) nanoparticles (NPs) and investigated their optical and electrochemical properties. On ultraviolet irradiation, PSO NPs display blue emission because of the presence of oxygen vacancies. Interestingly, PSOB NPs have higher blue emission intensity than undoped PSO NPs owing to the increase in oxygen vacancy defect density induced by Bi3+ doping. Moreover, PSOB NPs display higher efficiency in terms of current density than PSO NPs as a catalyst toward the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The kinetic OER models of PSO and PSOB NPs are quite different as displayed by their different Tafel slopes. Interestingly and as another advantage, the PSOB sample is more conducting with low impedance value than the PSO counterpart. With all these advantages due to high oxygen vacancies induced by Bi3+ doping, PSOB NPs have a great potential to be used as blue phosphors, charge storage devices, and capacitors.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the financial support by the IIT startup funds. SKG thanks the United States-India Education Foundation (USIEF, India) and the Institute of International Education (IIE, USA) for his Fulbright Nehru Postdoctoral Fellowship (Award No. 2268/FNPDR/2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, Texas, 78539, USA

    Allen Abraham, Swati Mohan & Hisham Abdou

  2. Radiochemistry Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, 400085, India

    Santosh K. Gupta

  3. Department of Chemistry, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, 60616, USA

    Yuanbing Mao

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  1. Allen Abraham
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  2. Santosh K. Gupta
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Correspondence to Yuanbing Mao.

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Abraham, A., Gupta, S.K., Mohan, S. et al. Defect-induced optical and electrochemical properties of Pr2Sn2O7 nanoparticles enhanced by Bi3+ doping. Journal of Materials Research 35, 1214–1224 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2020.48

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