S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 (S-TiO2, Cr-TiO2, S-Cr-TiO2) were successfully synthesized via a simple, effective and environmental benign solid state reaction route. The low angle XRD patterns demonstrated that the resulting samples possess mesostructures. The further characterizations via N-2 adsorption-desorption and XPS showed that the typical S/Cr co-doped mesoporous TiO2 (S-CrTiO2( 5S-5Cr)) possesses mesopore with the high specific surface area of 118.4m(2)/g and narrow pore size distribution, and both S and Cr have been incorporated into the lattice of TiO2 with the amounts of 4.16% sulfur and 7.88% chromium, respectively. And Raman spectroscopy shows that the surface of S-CrTiO2 (5S-5Cr) material possesses stretching vibrational peaks at similar to 709, similar to 793 cm(-1) are assignable to the Ti-O-Cr, O-Cr (Ti)-OH bonds, respectively. Interestingly, the UV-vis displayed that the absorption regions of S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 cover the visible light region. As for the series of S-Cr-TiO2 samples, the absorption region even extends to near infrared region with strong adsorption. Moreover, compared with the pure titanium dioxide (P25-TiO2), the photodegradation properties of bromocresol green (BCG) on the S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 showed excellent photocatalytic properties under visible light irradiation. Within 50 min visible light irradiation, 82.6% of the initial BCG was degraded for the S-Cr-TiO2 (6S-4Cr) photocatalyst. (C) 2011 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.