Wet-chemical Synthesis of Noble metal@1T’-transition Metal Dichalcogenide Core-shell Heterostructures for Highly Efficient Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Description

Heterostructures with rationally designed morphologies, compositions and interfaces possess intriguing properties and exhibit superior performance over their individual components in a wide range of applications, especially in catalysis. To prepare high-performanceheterostructured electrocatalysts, tremendous efforts have been devoted to the delicate control over their composition, exposed facet, size, dimension and morphology to boost their catalytic performance. As a typical example, noble metal@transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) coreshell heterostructures can serve as promising catalysts for various catalytic reactions, such aselectrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), benefiting from the intrinsic catalytic activity of noble metals and TMDs as well as the synergistic effect between these two components. Recently, phase engineering of nanomaterials (PEN) opens a new route to achieve the precise control of the atomic arrangement of nanomaterials to tune their properties and functions. Previous studies have revealed that the crystal phases of TMDs and noble metals could dramatically affect their physicochemical properties and catalytic performance. Therefore, the controlled regulation of the crystal phases of noble metal@TMD core-shell heterostructures could provide a promising strategy to develop novel high-performance catalysts towards a variety of catalytic reactions. However, to date, the research towards rationally tuning the crystal phases of noble metal@TMD core-shell heterostructures is still lacking since both noble metals and TMDs in various reported noble metal@TMD core-shell heterostructures are in the thermodynamically stable phases. Notably, our recent work has demonstrated that Au nanomaterials with unconventional phases, e.g., 4H/fcc Au nanorods, could be used as ideal templates for the growth and stabilization of 1T’-TMD monolayers, including MoS2 and MoSe2, leading to the construction of novel 4H/fcc-Au@TMD core-shell heterostructures as catalysts for highly efficient electrochemical HER. In this proposal, we aim to develop facile and general wet-chemical synthetic strategies towards the controlled synthesis of various novel noble metal@1T’-TMD core-shell heterostructures, and systematically study their structure-dependent properties and catalytic application, particularly in the electrochemical HER. Moreover, we will comprehensively investigate the formation mechanism of 1T’-TMD nanostructures on noble metals and unravel the structure performance relationship in the noble metal@1T’-TMD core-shell heterostructures for HER.