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The Electrical Transport Spectroscopy Team, co-led by Professor Xiangfeng Duan, Professor Anastassia Alexandrova, and Professor Yu Huang (Engineering), receives the RSC 2024 Faraday Horizon Prize for the development of electron transport microscopy to experimentally determine the platinum-surface hydronium pKa and its role in pH-dependent hydrogen evolution reactions.

The Faraday Horizon Prize recognizes significant and novel discoveries or advances in the area of physical chemistry. The Electrical Transport Spectroscopy team is a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The team has made a breakthrough in understanding how water interacts with the surface of platinum, crucial for clean energy technologies like green hydrogen production. They have invented a new method to directly probe the water structure at the platinum surface, examining how the hydrogen atoms within it are arranged and how these factors influence the chemical reactions that occur on the platinum.

Their research has for the first time experimentally revealed that the acidity (pKa) of water next to the platinum is much higher than normal, which helps explain a long-standing puzzle about how the pH of different solutions affects hydrogen production on these surfaces.

Additionally, the team’s method can help to assess the impact of various cations, anions or molecular species involved in an electrochemical process, as well as assessing adsorption/desorption dynamics. This knowledge could pave the way for designing entirely new and improved electrocatalysts, which are essential for advancing green hydrogen production and fuel cell technology.

“Receiving this prize is an immense honour and a culmination of over a decade-long pursuit in the development and optimization of electrical transport spectroscopy (ETS),” said Prof. Xiangfeng Duan. “I’m grateful for the collaboration of our talented team of graduate students and postdocs, as well as the invaluable contributions of our theory collaborators. We’re excited to continue our efforts in ETS, striving to advance our understanding and develop more efficient electrochemical systems that are indispensable for a sustainable future.”