Visible light-responsive titanium dioxide thin film prepared by reactive sputtering.

TiO2 is a wide band-gap semiconductor (3.4 eV) and can only absorb about 5% of sun light in the ultraviolet light region, which largely limits its practical applications because of the lower utility of sun light and quantum yield. In order to move the absorption edge of TiO2 films to visible spectrum range, we have made the impurity level within a band-gap of TiO2 thin film by introduction of oxygen vacancy. Oxygen-defected TiO2 photo-catalyst have prepared by reactive sputtering with the partial pressure of Ar:O2 = 76.7:23.3 approximately 98.5:1.5 ratios. As a result, we could have the impurity level of about 2.75 eV on condition that oxygen partial pressure is 2.9%. And the photocatalytic activity was realized at 400 nm wavelength.