Metal-support interfaces serve as the key active sites for catalytic reactions. The design of catalysts that simultaneously possess high interfacial density, superior activity, and robust stability represents a central challenge in enhancing the overall performance. Herein, we report an innovative synchronic assembly of multilevel micelles, where small metal-acetylacetonate micelles spontaneously assemble at the amphiphilic interfaces of larger triblock copolymer micelles. Subsequent crystallization and calcination semi-fix diverse metal nanoparticles (MNPs) within the walls of the resulting ordered mesoporous crystals, thereby achieving maximized interfacial density and structural robustness. The constructed representative interfaces, such as Cu(I)-O-Ti and Pd@Cu-O-Ti, demonstrated an enhanced oxygen activation capacity, which drove their exceptional catalytic oxidation performance and surpassed nearly all existing benchmarks. Synchronic assembly of multilevel micelles offers a bottom-up strategy to simultaneously control MNP properties, mesostructural ordering, and interface formation, enabling the precise design of high-performance catalysts and providing new insights for rational cross-scale and cross-dimensional interface engineering.
Kan et al. (2026) studied this question.