Chemical Insights into Interfacial Effects in Inorganic Nanomaterials

Abstract

effects of many inorganic nanomaterials for their chemical properties for various applications. [5,6] With respect to the chemical properties of inorganic nanomaterials, catalysis is one of their most important applications. Different from homogeneous catalysts and biocatalysts that own welldefined catalytic sites and thus controllable chemical environments to induce steric or electronic effects for optimizing their catalysis, [7,8] catalytic inorganic nanomaterials often possess various illdefined interfaces. For example, by using polymeric or small organic ligands, a large variety of catalytic metal nanocrystals with controlled size, shape, and composition have been synthesized during the past few decades. [9][10][11] However, limited information on their metal-organic interfaces has been obtained for correlating their catalysis with the surface organic capping agents. Moreover, supported metal nanocatalysts play important roles in a wide range of reactions in chemical industry. However, conventional supported metal catalysts are often prepared by depositing metal precursors on supports followed by reduction, [12] leading to the ill-defined catalytic sites and also the presence of possible different catalytic pathways. In many cases, although the importance of metal-support interfaces has been identified, the ill-defined interface structure makes it extremely difficult to correlate the catalytic performances with the interfaces at the atomic level for guiding the design of better-performance catalysts. In addition to catalysis, interfacial effects also play critical roles in the overall performance of many devices. For instance, interfacial engineering has been demonstrated as an effective approach to optimize the performance of recently emerging organic-inorganic lead halide perovskite. [13] In the general configuration of perovskite solar cells (PSCs), a perovskite layer is sandwiched between n-type electron transport material (ETM) and p-type hole transport material (HTM). [14] Together with the composition and quality control of perovskite films, interfacial engineering over the perovskite with ETM and HTM as well as among crystalline domains of perovskite films has been demonstrated to be crucial for improving both the efficiency and stability of large-area PSCs toward practical applications. [3,15] With no doubt, developing comprehensive understanding of the interfaces over inorganic nanomaterials (e.g., metalorganic, metal-support interfaces) is of great importance to the The interfaces between inorganic functional nanomaterials and their surface modifiers play important roles in determining their chemical and physical properties. In numerous situations, interfaces created by organic ligands or secondary inorganic components on inorganic nanomaterials induce significant effects to promote their performances. However, it still remains challenging to understand those interfacial effects at the molecular level. Herein, strategies via the design of model inorganic nanomaterials with well-defined and detectab...

Surface-Clean Au25 Nanoclusters in Modulated Microenvironment Enabled by Metal–Organic Frameworks for Enhanced Catalysis

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