Graphitic carbon nitrides as platforms for single-atom photocatalysis: moving towards design principles for improved performance

Abstract

This Direct Doctorate proposal will be focus on the development of new techniques to investigate single-atom catalysts (SACs). Characterize SACs and prove the presence of metals only as single-atoms is crucial in this field and very challenging. The SACs characterization is very dependent on advanced characterization techniques with low availability, such as EXAFS and aberration-corrected electron microscopy, which limits the investigation and popularization of the single-atom catalysis.1, 2 By making use of host materials with ordered structure and well-defined coordination sites, such as PHI and PTI, we intend to enable the investigation of the SACs by simpler techniques, such as spectroscopy techniques (e.g. FT-IR, Raman, CO-DRIFT-FTIR) and XRD. Our group obtained already promising results indicating that these techniques are very promising to investigate and characterize SACs. For example, DRIFT-FTIR of Ni-PHI, using CO molecules as probe, does not display bands to CO coordinated bridging to metal, indicating that all the metals stabilized in PHI atomically isolated (Fig.1). However, the lack of literature in this very recent field will require long systematic investigations to allow the use of such techniques. (AU)