Abstract
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are considered as promising catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) owing to their abundant active sites such as atomic vacancies and step edges. Moreover, TMDs have polymorphism, which has stimulated extensive studies on tuning of surface electronic structures for an active HER. The polymorphism in TMDs provides an opportunity for new hybrid catalysts with TMDs and other catalytic metals via surface engineering that can create a novel functional surface of the catalytic electrode for the active HER. Here, we report a hybrid catalyst with monoclinic MoTe2 and platinum (Pt) for the HER. Pt atoms were chemically bound to the surface of monoclinic MoTe2 that has an atomically distorted lattice structure, which produces a distinct Pt-Te alloy layer. The Pt/MoTe2 hybrid catalyst exhibits an active HER with a Tafel slope of 22 mV per decade and an exchange current density of 1.0 mA/cm2, which are the best values among those reported for TMD-based catalysts. The use of minimum amount of Pt on atomically distorted metallic TMDs realizes rich catalytic active sites on large basal planes for efficient hydrogen production.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 071118 |
| Journal | APL Materials |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Jul 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:D. Bae and S. Cho were supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (Grant No. 2017R1A2B4010423). H. Yang was supported by the NRF under Grant No. NRF-2018M3D1A1058793. We thank the Korea Institute for Advanced Study for providing computing resources (KIAS Center for Advanced Computation Linux Cluster System) for this work. Y.W.S. was supported by the NRF of Korea (Grant No. 2017R1A5A1014862, SRC Program: vdWMRC Center). The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Author(s).
