What can in-situ surface science reveal about the "devil" face of your electrocatalyst?
Magali Lingenfelder a b
a Max Planck-EPFL Center for Molecular Nanoscience and Technology- Lausanne, Switzerland
b Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Institute of Physics, Lausanne, Switzerland
Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS)
Proceedings of nanoGe Spring Meeting 2022 (NSM22)
#ElectroCat22. Electrocatalysis for the Production of Fuels and Chemicals
Online, Spain, 2022 March 7th - 11th
Organizers: Julio Lloret Fillol and James Durrant
Invited Speaker, Magali Lingenfelder, presentation 151
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nsm.2022.151
Publication date: 7th February 2022

In this famous quote that most surface scientists love and hate in equal proportions, Pauli said: „God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil“.

In this talk,  I will show you how even the most well designed and atomically controlled 2D catalysts, and even the most common metal surfaces suffer from dynamic structural transformations when you look at them at the nanoscale, under electrochemical reaction conditions. The „devil“  face of electrocatalysts can affect the product selectivity trends in detrimental ways, but it can also be tuned to increase their performance in key reactions in artificial photosynthesis schemes. I will show you a few examples on the surface dynamics of Cu electrodes involved in CO2 electroreduction (CO2RR), and 2D transition metal-based materials that catalyze oxygen evolution reactions (OER). I will discuss the use of scanning probe microscopy and solid state spectroscopy to track the surface dynamics of electrocatalysts in-situ, and present a few unconventional strategies to reach significant boosts in the catalytic activity of Earth-abundant 2D materials (using spin-selective mechanisms).

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