An Experimental and Theoretical Study on the Effect of Silver Nanoparticles Concentration on the Structural, Morphological, Optical, and Electronic Properties of TiO2 Nanocrystals

In this work, pure and silver (Ag)-loaded TiO2 nanocrystals (NCs) with various concentrations of Ag were prepared by soft chemical route and the effect of Ag nanoparticles (NPs) on the functional properties of TiO2 was studied. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman studies confirmed that the synthesized product had single-phase nature and high crystalline quality. The crystallite size was decreased from 18.3 nm to 13.9 nm with the increasing in concentration of Ag in TiO2 NCs. FESEM micrographs showed that the pure and AgNPs-loaded TiO2 have spherical morphology and uniform size distribution with the size ranging from 20 to 10 nm. Raman spectroscopy performed on pure and AgNPs-loaded TiO2 confirms the presence of anatase phase and AgNPs. Optical properties show the characteristics peaks of TiO2 and the shifting of the peaks position was observed by changing the concentration of Ag. The tuning of bandgap was found to be observed with the increase in Ag, which could be ascribed to the synergistic effect between silver and TiO2 NCs. Density functional theory calculations are carried out for different Ag series of doped TiO2 lattices to simulate the structural and electronic properties. The analysis of the electronic structures show that Ag loading induces new localized gap states around the Fermi level. Moreover, the introduction of dopant states in the gap region owing to Ag doping can be convenient to shift the absorption edge of pristine TiO2 through visible light.