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Crafting vacancies offers an efficient route to upgrade the selectivity and productivity of nanomaterials for CO 2 electroreduction. However, defective nanoelectrocatalysts bear catalytically active vacancies mostly on their surface, with the rest of the interior atoms adiaphorous for CO 2 -to-product conversion. Herein, taking nanosilver as a prototype, we arouse the catalytic ability of internal atoms by creating homogeneous vacancies realized via electrochemical reconstruction of silver halides. The homogeneous vacancies-rich nanosilver, compared to the surface vacancies-dominated counterpart, features a more positive d-band center to trigger an intensified hybridization of the Agd orbital with the CP orbital of the *COOH intermediate, leading to an accelerated CO 2 -to-CO transformation. These structural and electronic merits allow a large-area (9 cm –2) electrode to generate nearly pure CO with a CO/H 2 Faradaic efficiency ratio of 6932 at an applied current of 7. 5 A. These findings highlight the potential of designing new-type defects in realizing the industrialization of electrocatalytic CO 2 reduction.
Qin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.