In the last few years TiO 2-based materials have been extensively studied due to the
effectiveness in water decontamination. The main issue to overcome for a real sun driven
application of this emerging technology is to use the visible part of the solar spectrum. It is
known that the presence of metal nanoparticles improves the efficiency of TiO 2 due to
several factors, including localized surface plasmon resonance and scavenging of electrons.
In this work, we demonstrate that the optical properties of the Ag nanoparticles and of the …