Titania (TiO2) is a typical n-type semiconductor and widely used photocatalyst, but its light absorption range is limited to the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum of light due to its wide band gap. UV energy of the sun is only about 5% of its total energy, thus it greatly restricts application range of TiO2 photocatalysis.

Recently, Prof. Yujie Xiong’s work as a co-correspondent author on Nanoscale 2013, 5, 3030 shows a facile method has been developed to synthesize uniform nanoscale YF3 architectures. Enabled by doping with different lanthanides ions, the products can exhibit various down- or up-conversion luminescences, showing their potentials in serving as versatile host matrixes. The tunable luminescent properties allow designing effective upconversion photocatalysts when the doped YF3 nanostructures are coated with a TiO2 shell on their surface. In particular, the YF3@TiO2 hybrid structures have the porous nature that is partially inherited from the YF3 architectures, whose high surface-to-volume ratio facilitates their use as photocatalysts. They have demonstrated that the YF3:Yb,Tm@TiO2 structures exhibit satisfactory photocatalytic activities under the irradiation of both UV and near IR light. As compared with the conventional TiO2 catalysts, the hybrid structures here offer better performance in photocatalysis in the full solar spectrum. It is anticipated that this work provides a new approach to designing photocatalysts with responses to a broader spectral range.