Breaking the Correlation between Energy Costs and Kinetic Barriers in Hydrogen Evolution via a Cobalt Pyridine-Diimine-Dioxime Catalyst

Abstract

A central challenge in the development of inorganic hydrogen evolution catalysts is to avoid deleterious coupling between the energetics of metal site reduction and the kinetics of metal hydride formation. In this work, we combine theoretical and experimental methods to investigate cobalt diimine-dioxime catalysts that show promise for achieving this aim by introducing an intramolecular proton shuttle via a pyridyl pendant group. Using over 200 coupled-cluster-level electronic structure calculations of the Co-based catalyst with a variety of pyridyl substituents, the energetic and kinetic barriers to hydrogen formation are investigated, revealing nearly complete decoupling of the energetics of Co reduction and the kinetics of intramolecular Co hydride formation. These calculations employ recently developed quantum embedding methods that allow for local regions of a molecule to be described using high-accuracy wavefunction methods (such as CCSD(T)), thus overcoming significant errors in the DFT-level descr...