High-density single-atom electrocatalytic centers on two-dimensional topological platinum tellurides with Te-vacancy superstructure
Abstract
Chemical activation of the intrinsically inert basal planes of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) is crucial for developing high-efficiency electrocatalysts for energy technology applications. Here we report the discovery of an efficient TMD-based topological catalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), containing high-density single-atom reactive centers on a few-layer (7x7)-PtTe2-x superstructure with a Te-vacancy density of x. Compared with pristine Pt(111), PtTe2, and (2x2)-PtTe2-x, (7x7)-PtTe2-x exhibits superior HER performance owing to its substantially increased density of undercoordinated Pt sites, and displays exceptional catalytic stability when operating at high current densities. Our first-principles calculations confirm that multiple types of undercoordinated Pt sites on (7x7)-PtTe2-x exhibit favorable hydrogen adsorption Gibbs free energies, and that the reactive sites can further increase their population upon increasing hydrogen coverage. Both the (2x2)- and (7x7)-PtTe2-x are also shown to possess nontrivial band topology with robust edge states that may further facilitate HER.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2307.10759,
title = {High-density single-atom electrocatalytic centers on two-dimensional topological platinum tellurides with Te-vacancy superstructure},
author = {Xin Xu and Xuechun Wang and Shuming Yu and Chenhui Wang and Guowei Liu and Hao Li and Jiangang Yang and Jing Li and Tao Sun and Xiao Hai and Lei Li and Xue Liu and Ying Zhang and Weifeng Zhang and Quan Zhang and Kedong Wang and Nan Xu and Yaping Ma and Fangfei Ming and Ping Cui and Jiong Lu and Zhenyu Zhang and Xudong Xiao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.10759},
year = {2024}
}