Review of doping SrTiO3 for photocatalytic applications.

As a representative composite metal oxide belonging to a perovskite, strontium titanate (SrTiO3) possesses the merits of chemical stability, low toxicity and low cost, endowing it with significant application potentials in environmental remediation, clean energy generation and valuable chemical production from greenhouse gas conversion. However, the pure-phase SrTiO3 suffers from many fatal weaknesses, especially the wide energy bandgap and low photoexcited electron–hole pair separation efficiency, thus limiting its photocatalytic performance and large-scale applications. To address this issue, researchers have made great efforts to modify the electronic and physicochemical structure of SrTiO3. In particular, doping treatments have attracted considerable attention, but some problems still block effective doping, while impropriate doping might worsen the photocatalytic performance of SrTiO3 by introducing the photogenerated hole–electron pair recombination centres. Consequently, many challenges remain for this research topic that is undergoing an intense study. This short review presents the hot spots of appropriate doping treatments of SrTiO3 for photocatalytic performance enhancement over recent years. Different kinds of doping species are systematically discussed. The current problems that remain are summarized and analysed, and the perspectives for the rational doping of SrTiO3 are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]