One-step nitrogen plasma process for bimetallic impregnation to obtain N-TiO2− X /Au/Ag composite.

The main motivation of this work is to deposit two different metals (gold and silver) on titanium oxide nanoparticles surface in a one-step simple and fast physical process by applying a nitrogen plasma as the main source of nitrogen atoms to obtain nanostructured N-TiO_{2 − X} /Au/Ag materials. The obtained nanomaterials were characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Based on the characterization results, we found that gold and silver nanoparticles were uniformly loaded on the titanium oxide nanocomposite surface, showing a surface plasmon absorption band due to the loading of the metal nanoparticles over titania samples. The results of this work have shown that nitrogen plasma technique is a more feasible and simple alternative to obtain the N-TiO_{2 − X} /Au/Ag nanocomposite. Moreover, this plasma technique could be used to impregnate with other kind of metals over the surface of diverse nanomaterials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]