The oxidation of methane, the main component of natural gas, to selectively form oxygenated chemical feedstocks using molecular oxygen has been a long-standing grand challenge in catalysis. Here, using gold nanoparticles supported on the zeolite ZSM-5 we introduce a method to oxidise methane to methanol and acetic acid in water at temperatures between 120-240 °C using molecular oxygen in the absence of any added co-reductant. Electron microscopy reveals that the catalyst does not contain gold atoms or clusters, but rather gold nanoparticles are the active component while a mechanism involving surface adsorbed species is proposed in which methanol and acetic acid are formed via parallel pathways.

The recent emerging progress of quantum dot ink (QD-ink) has overcome the complexity of multiple-step colloidal QD (CQD) film preparation and pronouncedly promoted the device performance. However, the detrimental hydroxyl (OH) ligands induced from synthesis procedure have not been completely removed. Here, a halide ligand additive strategy was devised to optimize QD-ink process. It simultaneously reduced sub-bandgap states and converted them into iodide-passivated surface, which increase carrier mobility of the QDs films and achieve thicker absorber with improved performances. The corresponding power conversion efficiency of this optimized device reached 10.78%. (The control device was 9.56%.) Therefore, this stratege can support as a candidate strategy to solve the QD original limitation caused by hydroxyl ligands, which is also compatible with other CQD-based optoelectronic devices.

No abstract

No abstract