Crystalline Control of 111 Bounded Pt3Cu Nanocrystals: Multiply-Twinned Pt3Cu Icosahedra with Enhanced Electrocatalytic Properties

Despite that different facets have distinct catalytic behavior, the important role of twin defects on enhancing the catalytic performance of metallic nanocrystals is largely unrevealed. The key challenge in demonstrating the importance of twin defects for catalysis is the extreme difficulties in creating nanostructures with the same exposed facets but tunable twin defects that are suitable for catalytic investigations. Herein, we show an efficient synthetic strategy to selectively synthesize 111-terminated Pt3Cu nanocrystals with controllable crystalline features. Two distinct 111-bounded shapes, namely, multiply-twinned Pt3Cu icosahedra and single-crystalline Pt3Cu octahedra, are successfully prepared by simply changing the types of Cu precursors with the other growth parameters unchanged. Electrocatalytic studies show that the 111-terminated Pt3Cu nanocrystals exhibit the very interesting crystalline nature-dependent electrocatalytic activities toward both the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) with multiply-twinned Pt3Cu icosahedra demonstrating enhanced electrocatalytic activities compared to the single-crystalline Pt3Cu octahedra due to their additional yet important effect of twin defect. As a result, under the multiple tuning conditions (alloy, shape, and twin effects), the multiply-twinned Pt3Cu icosahedra exhibit much enhanced electrocatalytic activities in both ORR and MOR with respect to the Pt black. The present work highlights the importance of twin defects in enhancing electrocatalytic activities of metallic nanocrystals.