Abstract
The degradation of rose bengal dye under UV irradiation was investigated for the oxygen-deficient Gd3+ ion doped CeO2 fabricated via the sol-gel technique. A single-phase crystalline structure with crystallite size varying from 7.38 nm to 9.48 nm and lattice parameters ranging from 5.407 Å – 5.420 Å were analyzed using XRD. The particles to be spherical with a size in the range of 7.6 nm–9.8 nm were analyzed using HR-TEM. The presence of oxygen vacancies by the appearance of the longitudinal optical mode was confirmed by Raman analysis. The percentage of oxygen vacancies increases from 1.5% to 7.3% and the decrease in the band gap values was observed from 3.16 eV to 2.87 eV with an increment in the Gd3+ ion concentration. The ferromagnetic character was also found to be increased. The increase in the magnetization value from 0.246 × 10−2 emu/g to 12.961 × 10−2 emu/g was reported for Ce0.92Gd0.08O2. Also, the synthesized photocatalysts show excellent degradation of rose bengal dye under UV irradiation with a drastic increment in values from 73.06% to 92.32% with doping and can be useful for the environment.
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