Facile laser synthesized low precious metal catalysts enable efficient HER in alkaline and acidic media

Scalable water electrolysis requires mass-producible electrocatalysts for efficient hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) at high current densities. We developed a pulsed laser fusion method to synthesize Pd-CuInP2S6 composites on graphene or MXene Ti3C2 nanosheets. These catalysts exhibit enhanced charge transfer and abundant active sites, outperforming commercial Pt/C in both acidic (0.5 M H2SO4) and alkaline (1 M KOH) electrolytes. Density functional theory (DFT) analysis reveals synergistic HER enhancement via interstitial H and substituted In atoms. The optimized catalysts achieve remarkable overpotentials of -388 and -384 mV at 1,000 mA cm-2 (acid), with Tafel slopes of 61 and 67 mV dec-1, while demonstrating -455 and -450 mV overpotentials (alkaline) with 152 and 150 mV dec-1 Tafel slopes, respectively. They maintain exceptional stability over 10,000 CV cycles and extended operation at -500 mA cm-2, significantly surpassing Pt/C durability. This laser fabrication strategy enables scalable production of efficient, stable low-precious-metal catalysts for industrial HER.