The fabrication of microstructures/nanostructures of a uniform yet well-defined morphology has attracted broad interest from a variety of fields of advanced functional materials, especially catalysts. Most of the conventional methods generally suffer from harsh synthesis conditions, requirement of bulky apparatus, or incapability of scalable production, etc. To meet these formidable challenges, it is strongly desired to develop a facile, cost-effective, scalable method to fulfill a morphology purification. By a precipitation reaction between AgNO3 and KI, we report that irregular AgI structures, or their mixture with towerlike AgI architectures could be fabricated. Compared to the former, the mixed structures exhibit enhanced catalytic reactivity toward the photodegradation of Methyl Orange pollutant. However, its catalytic durability, which is one of the most crucial criteria that are required by superior catalysts, is poor. We further show that the irregular structures could be facilely removed from the mixture via a KI-assisted chemical dissolution, producing AgI of a uniform towerlike morphology. Excitingly, after such simple morphology purification, our towerlike AgI displays not only a boosted catalytic durability but also an enhanced catalytic reactivity. Our chemical dissolution-based morphology purification protocol might be extended to other systems, wherein high-quality advanced functional materials of desired properties might be developed.Keywords: boosted catalytic durability; chemical dissolution; enhance catalytic reactivity; morphology purification; visible-light/sunlight-driven photocatalysts;

Surfactant-assisted self-assembly (SAS) has received much attention for supramolecular nanoassemblies, due to its simplicity and easiness in realizing a controllable assembly. However, in most of the existing SAS protocols, the employed surfactants work only as a regulator for a controllable assembly but not as active species for function improvement. In this paper, we report that a porphyrin, zinc 5,10,15,20-tetra(4-pyridyl)-21H,23H-porphine (ZnTPyP), could be assembled to form one-dimensional (1D) supramolecular nanostructures via a SAS method, wherein graphene oxide (GO) plays a fascinating role of sheetlike surfactant. We show that, when a chloroform or tetrahydrofuran solution of ZnTPyP is injected into an aqueous dispersion of GO, 1D supramolecular nanoassemblies of ZnTPyP with well-defined internal structures could be easily formulated in a controllable manner. Our experimental facts disclose that the complexation of ZnTPyP with the two-dimensional GO nanosheets plays an important role in this new type of SAS. More interestingly, compared with the 1D ZnTPyP nanoassemblies formulated via a conventional SAS, wherein cetyltrimethylammonium bromide is used as surfactant, those constructed via our GO-assisted SAS display distinctly enhanced photocatalytic activity for the photodegradation of rhodamine B under visible-light irradiation. Our new findings suggest that GO could work not only as an emergent sheetlike surfactant for SAS in terms of supramolecular nanoassembly but also as functional components during the performance of the assembled nanostructures.Keywords: graphene oxide; porphyrin; sheetlike surfactant; supramolecular nanoassemblies; surfactant-assisted self-assembly;

We report herein that Ag/AgCl-based plasmonic photocatalysts with controlled size and shape could be easily formulated by a one-pot approach via a precipitation reaction between AgNO3 or Ag(NH3)2NO3 and NaCl. It is found that near-spherical and cube-like Ag/AgCl nanoarchitectures of 500 nm could be fabricated at lower and higher temperature, respectively. Fascinatingly, when graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets are introduced into the synthesis medium, the size of the formulated near-spherical and cube-like nanostructures, Ag/AgCl/GO, could be 2.5 and 5 times reduced to ca. 200 and 100 nm, respectively, when AgNO3 and Ag(NH3)2NO3 are employed as the silver source. The series of our Ag/AgCl-based nanostructures could be used as visible-light-driven plasmonic photocatalysts for the photodegradation of methyl orange pollutants, wherein the cube-like Ag/AgCl/GO nanoarchitectures of 100 nm display the highest catalytic activity. It is disclosed that the synergistic effect of size, shape, and GO nanosheets plays an important role for their boosted photocatalytic performances. The investigation reveals that GO nanosheets work not only as a capping agent for a controllable fabrication of Ag/AgCl nanostructures, but also as catalyst promoter during the photocatalytic performances, leading to an enhanced catalytic activity. Our unique GO-assisted method likely paves a facile avenue and initiates new opportunities for the exploration of GO-hybridized high-performance catalysts.