Enhancing photocatalytic antibiotics mineralization and water oxidation via constructing interfacial electric field in plate-on-plate BiOCl/WO3 photocatalysts

Two-dimensional materials and related plate-on-plate interfacial heterostructures offer great flexibility for integrating different atomic layers, providing an attractive scheme for the construction of built-in electric fields in photocatalysts. Here, we developed an interfacial engineering strategy to construct well-interfaced plate-on-plate BiOCl/WO3 heterojunctions for general enhanced photocatalytic oxidation reactions. BiOCl/WO3 heterojunctions exhibited significant enhancements in oxygen evolution and antibiotic degradation, with a rate of 9.5 times and 14.7 times higher than that of WO3. This enhancement is attributed to the well lattice matching contact surface of WO3 {0 2 0} plane with BiOCl {0 0 1} plane, which integrates a strong built-in electric field induced by Bi-O chemically bonds, providing atomically fast transport channels for electrons. These findings offer new guidelines for designing interfacial structures for high-performance oxidative photocatalysts and provide insights into the underlying interfacial carrier transport mechanisms.