New photoactive materials based on zirconium dioxide doped with rare earth metal ions

Among the semiconductors employed in photocatalytic reactions, transition metal oxides play a paramount role due to their qualities in term of stability in various media often accompanied by low or reasonable cost. The search for innovative materials in these fields is oriented to select systems having a suitable electronic structure capable of harvesting solar light (which means essentially visible light) and excellent potentials to perform the desired redox process. In the present contribution we intend to analyze the spectroscopic and photocatalytic properties induced by engineering the band gap of ZrO2 and show how using low energy photons it is possible to observe charge separation and photocatalytic activity in spite of the relatively large band gap value of the oxide (5 eV). We investigated the effect of lanthanides doping in zirconium dioxide matrix.