Synthesis, characterization and visible-light photocatalytic performance of Ag2CO3 modified by graphene-oxide

• The GO/Ag2CO3 composite based on GO was prepared by a facile one-step synthesis.
• The photocatalytic degradation followed the pseudo-first-order reaction model.
• GO promoted the separation of photoexcited electron–hole pairs in the GO/Ag2CO3.

Ag2CO3 coupled with graphene-oxide composites were prepared by a facile one-step synthesis. The samples were characterized by Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), Fourier transformed infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and Raman spectra. The as-prepared graphene-oxide/Ag2CO3 (GO/Ag2CO3) exhibited universally high photocatalytic activity toward typical methylene blue (MB) and methyl orange (MO) in aqueous solution. A possible photocatalytic mechanism was investigated by a series of radical trapping experiment. The kinetics of the GO/Ag2CO3 composites were also proposed. The result showed that GO might serve as an electron collector and a transporter to promote the separation of photoexcited electron–hole pairs and to decrease the possibility of electron and hole recombination efficiently. This work has set up a simple method for exploring the excellent GO-based photocatalysts.