Atomic-level-designed copper atoms on hierarchically porous gold architectures for high-efficiency electrochemical CO2 reduction

Abstract

Electrochemical CO2 reduction is a promising technology for solving the CO2 emission problems and producing value-added products. Here, we report a hierarchically porous Cu1Au single-atom alloy (SAA) as an efficient electrocatalyst for CO2 reduction. Benefiting from the hierarchically porous architectures with abundant vacancies as well as three-dimensional accessible active sites, the as-prepared nanoporous Cu1Au SAA catalyst shows remarkable CO2 reduction performance with nearly 100% CO Faraday efficiency in a wide potential range (−0.4 to −0.9 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode. The in-situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy studies and density functional theory calculations reveal that the Cu-Au interface sites serve as the intrinsic active centers, which can facilitate the activated adsorption of CO2 and stabilize the *COOH intermediate.