Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has been intensively investigatedin photocatalysis due to its relatively low cost, high stability,non-toxicity and high photocatalytic efficiency [1–3]. But theapplications of TiO2photocatalysts are greatly restricted by itslow quantum efficiency and ineffective utilization of visible light,which result from its high recombination rate of photo-generatedelectron-hole pairs and wide band gap (3.2 eV), respectively[4–6]. In the past decades, lots of approaches have been devel-oped to modify TiO2to increase the lifetime of photo-generatedelectron–hole pairs and narrow the band gap, such as couplingwith other narrow band gap semiconductor materials [7–9], mod-ification with metal and nonmetal elements [10–12], surfacesensitization by organic dye molecules [13,14], hydrogen plasmatreatment [15–17] and so on. Among all these methods, modifica-tion TiO2with nonmetal elements is promising and facile to solvethe problem of ineffective utilization of visible light and high carriesrecombination rate [18–22]