Proton Tunneling: A New Insight into Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer in Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution Reactions

Proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) is the key step for energy conversion in electrocatalysis. Atomic-scale simulation acts as an indispensable tool to provide a microscopic understanding of PCET. However, consideration of the quantum nature of transferring protons under an exact grand canonical (GC) constant potential condition is a great challenge for theoretical electrocatalysis. Here, we develop a unified computational framework to explicitly treat nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) by a sufficient GC sampling, further assisted by a machine learning force field adapted for electrochemical conditions. Our work demonstrates a non-negligible impact of NQEs on PCET simulations for hydrogen evolution reaction at room temperature, and provides a physical picture that wave-like quantum characteristic of the transferring protons facilitates the particles to tunnel through classical barriers in PCET paths, leading to a remarkable activation energy reduction compared to classical simulations. Moreover, the physical insight of proton tunneling may reshape our fundamental understanding of other types of PCET reactions in broader scenarios of energy conversion processes.