title: Metal/oxide interfacial effects on the selective oxidation of primary alcohols.
abstract: A main obstacle in the rational development of heterogeneous catalysts is the difficulty in identifying active sites. Here we show metal/oxide interfacial sites are highly active for the oxidation of benzyl alcohol and other industrially important primary alcohols on a range of metals and oxides combinations. Scanning tunnelling microscopy together with density functional theory calculations on FeO/Pt(111) reveals that benzyl alcohol enriches preferentially at the oxygen-terminated FeO/Pt(111) interface and undergoes readily O-H and C-H dissociations with the aid of interfacial oxygen, which is also validated in the model study of Cu2O/Ag(111). We demonstrate that the interfacial effects are independent of metal or oxide sizes and the way by which the interfaces were constructed. It inspires us to inversely support nano-oxides on micro-metals to make the structure more stable against sintering while the number of active sites is not sacrificed. The catalyst lifetime, by taking the inverse design, is thereby significantly prolonged.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Guofeng
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China.
authors.forename: Fan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Center for Computational Chemistry and Research Institute of Industrial Catalysis, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.|School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT9 5AG, UK.
authors.forename: Zongjia
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
authors.forename: Qingfei
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Yongjun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ji
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Zhiqiang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Niu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Junjie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China.
authors.forename: Xinhe
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Bao
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Center for Computational Chemistry and Research Institute of Industrial Catalysis, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.|School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT9 5AG, UK.
authors.forename: Peijun
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.|Collaborative Innovation Center for Nanomaterial Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Yadong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li