Gold Nanoclusters Promote Electrocatalytic Water Oxidation at the Nanocluster/CoSe Interface.

Electrocatalytic water splitting to produce hydrogen comprises the hydrogen and oxygen evolution half reactions (HER and OER), with the latter as the bottleneck process. Thus, enhancing the OER performance and understanding the mechanism are critically important. Herein, we report a strategy for OER enhancement by utilizing gold nanoclusters to form cluster/CoSe composites; the latter exhibit largely enhanced OER activity in alkaline solutions. The Au/CoSe composite affords a current density of 10 mA cm at small overpotential of ∼0.43 V (cf. CoSe: ∼0.52 V). The ligand and gold cluster size can also tune the catalytic performance of the composites. Based upon XPS analysis and DFT simulations, we attribute the activity enhancement to electronic interactions between nanocluster and CoSe, which favors the formation of the important intermediate (OOH) as well as the desorption of oxygen molecules over Au/CoSe composites in the process of water oxidation. Such an atomic level understanding may provide some guidelines for design of OER catalysts.