Substrate Morphology Directs (001) SbSe Thin Film Growth by Crystallographic Orientation Filtering.

Antimony chalcogenide, SbX (X = S, Se), applications greatly benefit from efficient charge transport along covalently bonded (001) oriented (SbX) ribbons, making thin film orientation control highly desirable - although particularly hard to achieve experimentally. Here, it is shown for the first time that substrate nanostructure plays a key role in driving the growth of (001) oriented antimony chalcogenide thin films. Vapor Transport Deposition of SbSe thin films is conducted on ZnO substrates whose morphology is tuned between highly nanostructured and flat.

Strong metal-support interaction promoted scalable production of thermally stable single-atom catalysts.

Single-atom catalysts (SACs) have demonstrated superior catalytic performance in numerous heterogeneous reactions. However, producing thermally stable SACs, especially in a simple and scalable way, remains a formidable challenge. Here, we report the synthesis of Ru SACs from commercial RuO powders by physical mixing of sub-micron RuO aggregates with a MgAlFeO spinel.

Non defect-stabilized thermally stable single-atom catalyst.

Surface-supported isolated atoms in single-atom catalysts (SACs) are usually stabilized by diverse defects. The fabrication of high-metal-loading and thermally stable SACs remains a formidable challenge due to the difficulty of creating high densities of underpinning stable defects. Here we report that isolated Pt atoms can be stabilized through a strong covalent metal-support interaction (CMSI) that is not associated with support defects, yielding a high-loading and thermally stable SAC by trapping either the already deposited Pt atoms or the PtO units vaporized from nanoparticles during high-temperature calcination.

A general route to synthesize supported isolated oxide and mixed-oxide nanoclusters at sizes below 5 nm.

A simple and efficient route to prepare supported nanocrystalline oxides is presented. The synthesis procedure, i.e.