Prof. Wenxing Yang’s group in the center of Artificial Photosynthesis for Solar Fuels at Westlake University recently published a research paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper is titled “Plasmonic-Promoted Formation of Surface Adsorbed Stochastic CO during Electrochemical CO2 and CO Reduction on Cu at Extreme Low Overpotentials.”
The research revealed for the first time that the COstochastic originates from plasmonic excitation of Cu by laser excitation. The surface speciation of the catalyst, i.e., the copresence of mixed metallic Cu0 and Cu+ states, is discovered to be crucial for the formation of COstochastic. These results demonstrate that mechanistic studies of the CO(2)RR and other electrocatalytic reactions utilizing in situ Raman spectroscopy must carefully control the excitation fluence to avoid signals due to plasmonic excitations of the catalysts other than the electrochemical processes.
Ph.D. student Jianyang Zang is the first author. Prof. Wenxing Yang from the center of Artificial Photosynthesis for Solar Fuels at Westlake University is the corresponding author.