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Abstract Earth‐abundant metal oxides are usually considered as stable but catalytically inert toward hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) due to their unfavorable hydrogen intermediate adsorption performance. Herein, a heavy rare earth (Y) and transition metal (Co) dual‐doping induced lattice strain and oxygen vacancy stabilization strategy is proposed to boost CeO 2 toward robust alkaline HER. The induced lattice compression and increased oxygen vacancy (O v ) concentration in CeO 2 synergistically improve the water dissociation on O v sites and sequential hydrogen adsorption at activated O v ‐neighboring sites, leading to significantly enhanced HER kinetics. Meanwhile, Y doping offers stabilization effect on O v by its stronger Y─O bonding over Ce─O, which endows the catalyst with excellent stability. The Y,Co‐CeO 2 electrocatalyst exhibits an ultra‐low HER overpotential (27 mV at 10 mA cm −2 ) and Tafel slope (48 mV dec −1 ), outperforming the benchmark Pt electrocatalyst. Moreover, the anion exchange membrane water electrolyzer incorporated with Y,Co‐CeO 2 achieves excellent stability of 500 h under 600 mA cm −2 . This synergistic lattice strain and oxygen vacancy stabilization strategy sheds new light on the rational development of efficient and stable oxide‐based HER electrocatalysts.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.