Twinning Engineering of Platinum/Iridium Nanonets as Turing-Type Catalysts for Efficient Water Splitting

The twin boundary, a common lattice plane of mirror-symmetric crystals, may have high reactivity due to special atomic coordination. However, twinning platinum and iridium nanocatalysts are grand challenges due to the high stacking fault energies that are nearly 1 order of magnitude larger than those of easy-twinning gold and silver. Here, we demonstrate that Turing structuring, realized by selective etching of superthin metal film, provides 14.3 and 18.9 times increases in twin-boundary densities for platinum and iridium nanonets, comparable to the highly twinned silver nanocatalysts. The Turing configurations with abundant low-coordination atoms contribute to the formation of nanotwins and create a large active surface area. Theoretical calculations reveal that the specific atom arrangement on the twin boundary changes the electronic structure and reduces the energy barrier of water dissociation. The optimal Turing-type platinum nanonets demonstrated excellent hydrogen-evolution-reaction performance with a 25.6 mV overpotential at 10.0 mA·cm^–2 and a 14.8-fold increase in mass activity. And the bifunctional Turing iridium catalysts integrated in the water electrolyzer had a mass activity 23.0 times that of commercial iridium catalysts. This work opens a new avenue for nanocrystal twinning as a facile paradigm for designing high-performance nanocatalysts.