Electronic structures of active components play a pivotal role in determining catalytic activity in heterogeneous catalysis, and modulating electronic metal–support interactions is an efficient protocol to improve catalytic activity of supported metal nanoparticles. Herein, we tune the electronic metal–support interactions by supporting platinum nanoparticles on anatase TiO2(101) and TiO2(001) facets with different work functions to get Pt/TiO2(101) and Pt/TiO2(001), respectively. Owing to the lower work function of TiO2(101) than that of TiO2(001), the supported Pt nanoparticles on TiO2(101) are mainly at a metallic state via support→metal electron transfer, whereas the Pt nanoparticles on TiO2(001) preserve at the oxidation states. Compared with Pt/TiO2(001), the richer high-level electrons around the Fermi level of Pt/TiO2(101) more efficiently facilitate O2 activation and inhibit CO adsorption poisoning, simultaneously, thus lowering the activation energy of the reaction and enhancing the CO oxidation rates. This work provides a reasonable strategy for designing supported metal nanoparticle catalysts by modulating the electronic metal–support interactions via simple facet effects of supports.
He et al. (2026) studied this question.