title: When Inert Becomes Active: A Fascinating Route for Catalyst Design.
abstract: In this Personal Account, we review the work of our group in the area of environmental and energy-related nanocatalysis over the past seven years. We focus on understanding the fundamental mechanisms that control the properties of atomic clusters and nanoparticles - a form of matter that is intermediate between atoms and their bulk counterpart. The emphasis is on the theoretical design of effective catalysts based on cheap and abundant elements. The main idea that stands behind our work is that even catalytically inactive or completely inert materials can be functionalized at the nanoscale via the size, structure, morphology, and support effects. Such an approach opens up new ways to design catalytically active systems based on materials never before considered as catalysts. In particular, we demonstrate that hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), which has been traditionally considered an inert material, can be functionalized and become active for a number of catalytic reactions involving oxygen activation, oxidation by molecular oxygen, and the oxygen reduction reaction.
authors.affiliation: Global Research Center for Environment and Energy based on Nanomaterials Science (GREEN)National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, 305-0044, Japan. lyalin.andrey@nims.go.jp.
authors.forename: Andrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lyalin
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan.|Elements Strategy Initiative for Catalysts and Batteries (ESICB), Kyoto University, Kyoto, 615-8245, Japan.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan. take@sci.hokudai.ac.jp.|Elements Strategy Initiative for Catalysts and Batteries (ESICB), Kyoto University, Kyoto, 615-8245, Japan. take@sci.hokudai.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Tetsuya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Taketsugu
keywords: cluster compounds; gold; hexagonal boron nitride; nanoparticles; supported catalysts