title: Size and shape dependence of the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 nanocrystals: a total scattering Debye function study.
abstract: Nanocrystalline TiO(2) samples, prepared for smart textiles applications by the sol-gel technique in acidic or basic media, have been characterized by synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction and total scattering methods based on a fast implementation of the Debye function and original algorithms for sampling interatomic distances. Compared to the popular and widely used Rietveld-based approaches, our method is able to simultaneously model both Bragg and diffuse contributions and to quantitatively extract either sizes and size distribution information from the experimental data. The photocatalytic activity of the investigated samples is here systematically correlated to the average sizes and size distributions of anisotropically shaped coherent domains, modeled according to bivariate populations of nanocrystals grown along two normal directions.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze Chimiche e Ambientali, Università dell'Insubria, via Valleggio 11, 22100 Como, Italy.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cernuto
authors.forename: Norberto
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Masciocchi
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cervellino
authors.forename: Gian Maria
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Colonna
authors.forename: Antonietta
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Guagliardi