Highly durable and fully dispersed Co diatomic site catalysts for CO2 photoreduction to CH4

Dual-atom site catalysts (DACs) have emerged as new frontier in heterogeneous catalysis because the synergistic effect between adjacent metal atoms can promote their catalytic activity while maintaining advantages of single-atom site catalysts such as almost 100% atomic efficiency and excellent hydrocarbon selectivity. Herein, Co-based atom site catalysts with Co 2 -N coordination structure have been synthesized and used for photo-driven CO 2 reduction firstly, and the resulted CoDAC containing 3.5% Co atom demonstrates superior atom ratio for the best CO 2 reduction catalytic performance with 65.0% CH 4 selectivity, far exceeding that of Co-based single-atom site catalysts (CoSACs). The intrinsic reason for superior activity of CoDACs is excellent adsorption strength of CO 2 and CO* intermediates at dimeric Co active sites, which is much more beneficial for CH 4 production than that of CoSACs.