Congratulations to Yannick for our Review in ACS Catalysis!
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Colloidal Nanocrystals as Electrocatalysts with Tunable Activity and Selectivity
Correlating the catalyst activity, selectivity and stability with its structure and composition is of the utmost importance in advancing the knowledge of heterogeneous electrocatalytic processes for chemical energy conversion. Well-defined colloidal nanocrystals with tunable monodisperse size and uniform shapes are ideal platforms to investigate the effect of these parameters on the catalytic performance.
In addition to translate the knowledge from single crystal studies to more realistic conditions, the morphological and compositional complexity attainable by colloidal chemistry can provide access to active catalysts which cannot be produced by other synthetic approaches. The sample uniformity is also beneficial to investigate catalyst reconstruction processes via both ex-situ and operando techniques.
In this Review, we discuss recent studies in selected electrochemical reactions and provide our outlook on future developments on the use of well-defined colloidal nanocrystals as an emerging class of electrocatalysts.