Exploitation of piezoelectricity for enhancing photocatalytic activity of ZnO nanowires

We report on an investigation of the photocatalytic activity of substrate-supported ZnO nanowires (NWs) with Ag modification and induced bending. By degrading a 50 μM rhodamine B solution, it is found that the zeroth-order kinetic constant of Ag modified bent NWs is 1.4 and 2.2 times as high as that of Ag modified unbent NWs and unmodified as-grown NWs, respectively. The improvement due to bending is related to the piezoelectric property of ZnO that facilitates charge separation. The present work demonstrates the usefulness of piezoelectricity for photocatalysis.