Speaker
Description
Atomically dispersed precious metals on oxide supports have recently become increasingly interesting catalytic materials.$^{1,2}$ Nonetheless, their non-trivial preparation and limited thermal and environmental stability constitutes an issue for their potential applications. Here we demonstrate that an oxygen plasma pre-treatment of ceria supports (CeO$_{2}$(111) films and nanocrystalline powders) serves to anchor Pt single atoms, making them resistant towards sintering and considerably more active in the CO oxidation reaction. Through a combination of experimental results obtained on well-defined ceria surfaces and theoretical calculations (performed by the Lopez’s group at Tarragona), we show that the O$_{2}$ plasma causes surface nanostructuring and the formation of surface peroxo (O$_{2}$$^{2-}$) species, favoring the uniform and dense distribution of isolated strongly bonded Pt$^{2+}$ atoms. We believe that plasma functionlization can be applied to other metal/oxide systems to achieve tunable and stable catalysts with a high density of active sites.
References
1. J. Liu, ACS Catalysis 7, 34 (2017)
2. L. DeRita, et al., J Am. Chem. Soc. 139, 14150 (2017)
