Gold Nanoclusters Promote Electrocatalytic Water Oxidation at the Nanocluster/CoSe₂ 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/CoSe₂ composites; the latter exhibit largely enhanced OER activity in alkaline solutions. The Au₂₅/CoSe₂ composite affords a current density of 10 mA cm^-2 at small overpotential of ∼0.43 V (cf. CoSe₂: ∼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 CoSe₂, which favors the formation of the important intermediate (OOH) as well as the desorption of oxygen molecules over Au_n/CoSe₂ composites in the process of water oxidation. Such an atomic level understanding may provide some guidelines for design of OER catalysts.