Multifunctional property exploration: BiOI with high visible light photocatalytic performance and a large nonlinear optical effect.

Exploration of the versatility of materials is very important for increasing the utilization of materials. Herein, we successfully prepared BiOI powders a facile solvothermal method. The BiOI photocatalyst exhibited significantly higher photocatalytic activity as compared to the common BiOI photocatalyst in the degradation of methyl orange, methylene blue and rhodamine B under visible light irradiation. Especially, for the degradation of methyl orange, the photocatalytic activity of BiOI is about 10 times that of BiOI. Moreover, BiOI exhibits an extremely high second harmonic generation response of about 20 × KDP (the benchmark) estimated by the unbiased calculations. The coexisting multifunction of BiOI is mainly because of the increased dipole moment due to the stereochemical activity of lone pairs that promotes separation and transfer of photogenerated carriers, then enhances the photocatalytic activity and results in a high second harmonic generation response. This indicates that BiOI may have good potential applications in photocatalytic and nonlinear optical fields.