Improvement of synergistic effect photocatalytic/peroxymonosulfate activation for degradation of amoxicillin using carbon dots anchored on rod-like CoFe2O4

β-lactam antibiotics in aquatic environment have severely damaged ecological stability and caused a series of environmental pollution problems to be solved urgently. Herein, a novel composite photocatalyst prepared by loading carbon dots (CDs) onto rod-like CoFe 2 O 4 (CFO), which can effectively degrade amoxicillin (AMX) by photocatalytic/peroxymonosulfate (PMS) activation under visible light irradiation. The degradation results exhibits that the optimal degradation efficiency with 97.5% within 80 min is achievd by the CDs-CFO-5 composite. Such enhanced activity is ascribed to the introduction of CDs that effectively improves the separation efficiency of photogenerated electron pairs and creates new active sites as electron bridges that improve the photocatalytic performance. More importantly, a strong synergistic between CDs and photo-induced electrons generated from CFO can further activiate PMS to provide more SO 4 - · and ·OH radicals for boosting the degradation ability towards AMX. The present study aims to elucidate positive role of CDs in photocatalytic/peroxymonosulfate activation during the degradation reaction.