XAS for Cu-Metal-Oixde catalyst for CO2RR

The electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) has attracted a lot of attention over the past 10 years. The coupling of Cu with metal oxides offers great opportunities for this goal. In our group, we established a synthetic methodology, called colloidal atomic layer deposition (c-ALD) which allows the tuning of the morphology and thickness of Cu|MOx nanoparticles with different shell thicknesses from monolayers to tens of nm. We have discovered that spherical Cu@AlOx are active for CO2RR but, more importantly, stable during the reaction, which is opposite to what is observed for spherical copper nanoparticles alone.