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The electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) offers a promising route to mitigate excessive CO2 emissions while enabling the production of value-added chemicals. However, achieving high catalytic selectivity and activity toward specific products remains a critical challenge. Here, we engineer a confined interfacial environment formed between adjacent copper nanoparticles and systematically investigate its impact on CO2RR performance toward CO production. Our theoretical calculations reveal that the confined space effectively stabilizes the *COOH intermediate, a key species governing the CO2-to-CO conversion pathway. In contrast, this geometric confinement exerts a negligible influence on the adsorption energetics of *H, which is associated with the competing hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). As a consequence, the catalyst exhibits a markedly reduced onset potential for CO2RR, accompanied by enhanced selectivity and catalytic activity toward CO formation. These findings highlight the critical role of nanoscale confinement in modulating reaction energetics and provide a viable strategy for the rational design of highly efficient and selective catalysts for CO2RR.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.