General Synthetic Strategy to Ordered Mesoporous Carbon Catalysts with Single-Atom Metal Sites for Electrochemical CO2 Reduction

The electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO₂ RR) is a transformative technology to reduce the carbon footprint of modern society. Single-site catalysts have been demonstrated as promising catalysts for CO₂ RR, but general synthetic methods for catalysts with high surface area and tunable single-site metal composition still need to be developed to unambiguously investigate the structure-activity relationship crossing various metal sites. Here, a generalized coordination-condensation strategy is reported to prepare single-atom metal sites on ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) with high surface areas (average 800 m²  g^-1 ). This method is applicable to a broad range of metal sites (Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Pt, Pd, Ru, and Rh) with loadings up to 4 wt.%. In particular, the CO₂ RR to carbon monoxide (CO) Faradaic efficiency (FE) with Ni single-site OMC catalyst reaches 95%. This high FE is maintained even under large current density (>140 mA cm^-2 ) and in a long-term study (14 h), which suits the urgently needed large-scale applications. Theoretical calculations suggest that the enhanced activity on single-atom Ni sites results from balanced binding energies between key intermediates, COOH and CO, for CO₂ RR, as mediated by the coordination sphere.

High-efficiency perovskite nanocrystal light-emitting diodes via decorating NiOx on the nanocrystal surface

Nickel oxides exhibit a great potential as hole transport layers for the fabrication of efficient perovskite light-emitting diodes (LEDs) due to their high carrier mobility and good energy band matching with perovskite nanocrystals. In this work, nickel oxides were directly decorated on the CsPbBr3 nanocrystal surface through adsorption and a sequential oxidation treatment. The resulting sample shows a high photoluminescence quantum-yield of 82%. The LED using CsPbBr3 nanocrystals with nickel oxides achieves a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of up to 16.8% with a low turn-on voltage of 2.8 V, which is much superior to that of the counterpart LED based on pristine CsPbBr3 nanocrystals (EQE = 0.7%, turn-on voltage = 5.6 V). The excellent performance of the nickel oxide decorated CsPbBr3 nanocrystal device could be attributed to the better energy level matching between the decorated nanocrystals and the transport layers of the device and more balanced charge carrier injection. Furthermore, the operational lifetime of the nickel oxide decorated CsPbBr3 nanocrystal device is 40 times longer than that of the pristine CsPbBr3 nanocrystal device.