Aims & Scope

Photocatalysis as a scientific journal aims to serve to the research community by promoting the advance in the understanding, materials, processes, applications, and technological development of photocatalysis as a field. Key aims and scope could include:

1. Promote Fundamental Research
   • Advance understanding of photon-matter interactions and charge carrier thermodynamics and dynamics.
   • Establish the fundamental principles of photocatalysis, including reaction mechanisms, kinetic models, material properties and their relationship with photocatalytic activity.
2. Material Development and Innovation
   • Description of advanced and innovative photocatalytic materials, their structuration at various length scales, their combination forming junctions and hybrid systems.
   • Development of novel synthetic methods to improve material efficiency and stability, meeting the principles of sustainability and environmental benignity.
3. Applications in Energy and Environment
   • Support research on photocatalytic processes and applications for clean energy production, such as hydrogen evolution, photocatalytic overall water splitting, CO₂ reduction, nitrogen fixation, two-electrons oxygen reduction and other solar fuels.
   • Report on innovative environmental applications going beyond the state of the art, including water and wastewater treatment, air purification, and pollutant degradation.
   • Light-assisted biomass upgrading.
4. Technology and Scale-up
   • Encourage research on scaling up photocatalytic systems for industrial or commercial use, providing life cycle analyses and techno-economical assessments showing the advance of the photocatalytic process respect to alternative technologies.
   • Address challenges such as reactor design, various ways to use natural solar light and innovative light sources, use of light to improve energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness of processes.
5. Multidisciplinary Research
   • Application of artificial intelligence, computational chemistry on models to understand and predict efficient photocatalytic systems.
   • Use of in situ and operandotechniques to detect and characterize transient excited states and reaction intermediates, providing evidence on operating reaction mechanisms.
   • To become a platform for interdisciplinary studies, combining physics, engineering, catalysis, materials science and high-throughput techniques.
6. Encourage Sustainability
   • Examples showing photocatalysis as a technology to reduce the carbon footprint of established processes and improving resource efficiency and recycling.
7. Bridge Research and Society
   • Facilitate the translation of research from the lab to real-world applications by analyses of the social acceptance and possible impact of photocatalytic processes.
8. Provide a Forum for Emerging Topics
   • Identify and promote emerging trends in the field, such as bio-inspired systems, elaborated multicomponent and structured photocatalysts, infrared-light-driven photocatalysis and plasmonic photocatalysts.
   • Explore synergies with related fields, like electrocatalysis, photonics, and renewable energy technologies.
9. Promote Global Knowledge Exchange
   • Publish high-quality research, reviews, and perspectives to foster rapid and global dissemination of significant findings.
   • Support the scientific communication by publication in an open-access journal with high-quality and efficient peer review process.
10. Standardize and Benchmark
    • Contribute to the development of standards for photocatalytic performance evaluation and benchmarking, facilitating the advance in the field.
    • Description of good practices in photocatalytic reactions, indicating possible mistaking in common procedures.
    • Support reproducible and transparent reporting practices for experimental data.

Photocatalysis is published quarterly online by Scilight Press.