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Top-down strategy has been generally adopted for preparation of metal single atom catalysts (SACs) due to the simplified synthetic process, metal economics, and scalability characteristics. Herein, we propose a general top-down route to convert metal nanoparticles into uniformly dispersed metal single atoms in mild electrochemical environment via a facile cathodic corrosion process. Within the synthetic process, Pt nanoparticles precursors are transformed into migrating Pt single atoms (Pt1) driven by a high negative potential; and subsequently these mobile Pt atoms are trapped and stabilized by N coordination sites of N-doped carbon paper (NCP). The as-prepared Pt1/NCP electrodes exhibit a superior catalytic activity toward hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) with a low overpotential of 0.022 V at 10 mA/cm2 and a low Tafel slope of 28.5 mV/dec as well as a long-term durability. Notably, the proposed electrochemical atomic migration strategy shows a promising generality for fabricating other metal single atoms (e.g., Pd, Ir, Cu), which may open a new avenue for metallic SACs preparation.
This work is supported by Foundation from Institute of Materials CAEP (Nos. TP03201703, TP03201802, and CX2019018) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51701192 and 21706246).