Asymmetric gradient orbital interaction of hetero-diatomic active sites for promoting C - C coupling.

Diatomic-site catalysts (DACs) garner tremendous attention for selective CO photoreduction, especially in the thermodynamical and kinetical mechanism of CO to C products. Herein, we first engineer a novel Zn-porphyrin/RuCu-pincer complex DAC (ZnPor-RuCuDAC). The heteronuclear ZnPor-RuCuDAC exhibits the best acetate selectivity (95.1%), while the homoatomic counterparts (ZnPor-RuDAC and ZnPor-CuDAC) present the best CO selectivity. In-situ spectroscopic measurements reveal that the heteronuclear Ru-Cu sites easily appear C intermediate coupling. The in-depth analyses confirm that due to the strong gradient orbital coupling of Ru4d-Cu3d resonance, two formed CO intermediates of Ru-Cu heteroatom show a significantly weaker electrostatic repulsion for an asymmetric charge distribution, which result from a side-to-side absorption and narrow dihedral angle distortion. Moreover, the strongly overlapped Ru/Cu-d and CO molecular orbitals split into bonding and antibonding orbitals easily, resulting in decreasing energy splitting levels of C intermediates. These results collectively augment the collision probability of the two CO intermediates on heteronuclear DACs. This work first provides a crucial perspective on the symmetry-forbidden coupling mechanism of C intermediates on diatomic sites.