An overview of photocatalytic materials

Photocatalysis is an emerging technology that enables a wide variety of applications, including degradation of organics and dyes, antibacterial action, and fuel generation through water splitting and carbon dioxide reduction.Numerous inorganic semiconducting materials have been explored as photocatalysts, and the versatility of these materials and reactions has been expanded in recent years [1,2].Understanding the relationship between the physicochemical properties of photocatalytic materials and their performances as well as the fundamentals in catalytic processes is important to design and synthesis of photocatalytic materials [3,4].To present the state of the art of photocatalytic materials and their applications, as well as explore the fundamentals of photocatalytic processes, we compiled this special issue on photocatalytic materials, which includes metal oxides (TiO 2 ), metal-organic frameworks (MOF), plasmonics and hybrids for applications in water splitting, CO 2 reduction, and removal of environmental pollutants.The aspects of this special issue cover strategies of nanostructure and heterostructure design, surface defects and modifications, and the first-principles calculations, etc.We believe that these advances will be interesting to the broad readers of Journal of Materiomics.TiO 2 has been widely investigated for photocatalysis in removal of environmental pollutants, H 2 evolution and CO 2 reduction since 1972.It is generally accepted that the photocatalytic activity is affected by the light absorption, charge creation/recombination rate and surface reactivity.In this special issue, Binas et al. focused on modified TiO 2 as catalyst in heterogeneous photocatalytic