Steering Carbon Hybridization State in Carbon-Based Metal-free Catalysts for Selective and Durable CO<sub>2</sub> Electroreduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction using metal-free catalysts offers a promising and cost-effective approach to global carbon neutrality. However, metal-free catalysts frequently suffer from unsatisfactory catalytic performances, especially a low current density and poor stability. Herein, by modulating the orbital hybridization state of carbon, we strategically design a regulable sp3 and sp2 hybrid carbon interface embedded with adjacent boron and nitrogen sites in carbon-based metal-free catalysts for CO2 electroreduction. Soft X-ray chemical imaging visually uncovers that the electronic structure and bonding configuration of the boron active site at the hybrid carbon interface are modulated by the neighboring nitrogen site and sp3 carbon. The concomitant electron density reconfiguration around the interface not only delivers optimum upshift of the boron p-band center, and accordingly the moderate valence-electron depletion, to stabilize the *OCHO intermediate favorable for HCOOH generation but also weakens the boron–carbon and boron–hydrogen hybridization of competing *COOH and *H species, respectively, to promote HCOOH selectivity over CO and H2. The designed electrocatalyst realizes a record-high formate partial current density of up to 50.8 mA cm–2 among metal-free catalysts in the H-cell and maintains a high Faradaic efficiency (>90%) over 108 h. This work elevates the carbon interface design with a tailored carbon hybridization state for efficient CO2 electroreduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".