Designing of three-dimensional (3D) materials such as inverse-opal (IO) photonic crystals (PCs) has been identified as an effective pathway to enhance light harvesting to longer electromagnetic absorption regions such as visible and infrared. IO PCs exhibit photonic band gap (PBG) and this band structure predicts the translation of photons with reduced velocity, namely as slow photons at certain crystallographic directions. The photonic effect from titania (TiO_2)-1O structure was reported to enhance light-material interactions thus allowing better absorption of light at the wavelength at which the materials absorb poorly. On the other hand, utilization of gold-nanoparticles (Au-NPs) on TiO_2 could aid in charge separation and play its role as an amplifier for visible-light absorption due to its effects originating from localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR). In this study, TiO_2-IO PC with incorporated gold nanoparticles (Au-NPs) per void space was developed by implementing five important steps to achieve a good quality of TiO_2-IO structure. Both photonic effects due to the slow photons in TiO_2-IO structure and LSPR effects contributed by Au-NPs were expected to give visible-light absorption by the photocatalyst material.
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