Facile synthesis of Ag3PO4 modified with GQDs composites with enhanced visible-light photocatalytic activity

In this work, the Ag3PO4 modified with graphene quantum dots composites (GQDs–Ag3PO4) were synthesized via a facile precipitation method to further improve the photocatalytic performance of Ag3PO4. Interestingly, these GQDs–Ag3PO4 exhibited improved visible light photocatalytic performance for the degradation of rhodamine B than pure Ag3PO4. The composite with GQDs weight percentage of 0.48 showed the most excellent performance, which was completely almost 11.25 times than that of pure Ag3PO4. Furthermore, this composite also showed excellent photocatalytic performance for the photodegradation of para-chlorophenol, levofloxacin and negatively charged aromatic dye methyl orange. The remarkable enhancement of photocatalytic performance should be attributed to the larger surface area, the enhanced light absorption property and the effective suppression of electron–hole recombination.