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Abstract The invention of defect‐engineering motivated Z‐scheme photocatalytic complexes has been treated as an emerging opportunity to accomplish effective carrier separation and electron transfer in hybrid heterojunctions, contributing a novel approach to accomplish modified visible‐light driven photocatalytic performance compared to traditional nanocomposites. Exploring a desired carrier medium is crucial to support impressive electron transportation in Z‐scheme photocatalytic nanocomposites. Here, the role that the Sn 2+ /Sn 4+ redox couple plays in the photocatalytic process is systematically studied by taking the flower‐like SnO 2 /layered g‐C 3 N 4 with deficient Sn 2+ reactive sites as an example, where the defect‐engineering can be introduced by heat treatment. The experimental results and computational simulations demonstrate that the deficient Sn 2+ reactive sites can facilitate small molecule adsorption and boost the interfacial carrier separation and transfer in the photocatalytic procedure by bringing in the Sn 2+ /Sn 4+ redox couple. This work provides a more in‐depth exploration of Z‐scheme photocatalytic‐system construction and is helpful to the development of defect‐engineering approaches with high photocatalysis performance.
Bao et al. (2021) studied this question.