It is of a great challenge to achieve efficient single-atom catalysts (SACs) for electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction. Especially, the SACs from transition metals have complex electron conformation. It is urgently necessary to examine the effect of spin state of transition metals on the catalytic performance of SACs for nitrogen fixed. In this work, using density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we firstly evaluated the catalytic capability of 21 transition metals to achieve the most potential metals with the special electron conformation of d6, including Fe, Ru and Os, to construct SACs. Our examinations revealed that the catalytic performance of SAC for nitrogen reduction increases with the decrease of the spin multiplicity for the same metal through the same reaction pathway and further improves with the increase of period number of transition metal. Additionally, the selectivity of SAC for nitrogen reduction reaction also increases with the increase of period over hydrogen evolution reaction under the low spin state. Finally, we found that the OsN4C catalysts had excellent catalytic performance for nitrogen reduction with the extremely low overpotential (0.03V) through the distal reaction path under the low spin state, which were expected to be the potential industrial applications for electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction.
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