Grain-Boundary-Rich Ceria Metallene Nanozyme with Abundant Metal Site Pairs Boosts Phosphatase-like Activity
Wenxuan Jiang, Yu Wu, Rina Su, Weiqing Xu, Wenhong Yang, Yiwei Qiu, Yujia Cai, Canglong Wang, Liuyong Hu, Wenling Gu, Chengzhou Zhu
Abstract
Natural phosphatases featuring paired metal sites inspire various advanced nanozymes with phosphatase-like activity as alternatives in practical applications. Numerous efforts to create point defects show limited metal site pairs, further resulting in insufficient activity. However, it remains a grand challenge to accurately engineer abundant metal site pairs in nanozymes. Herein, we report a grain-boundary-rich ceria metallene nanozyme (GB-CeO 2 ) with phosphatase-like activity. Grain boundaries acting as the line or interfacial defects can effectively increase the content of Ce 4+ /Ce 3+ site pairs to 72.28%, achieving a 49.28-fold enhancement in activity. Furthermore, abundant grain boundaries optimize the band structure to assist the photoelectron transfer under irradiation, which further increases the content of metal site pairs to 88.96% and finally realizes a 114.39-fold enhanced activity over that of CeO 2 without irradiation. Given the different inhibition effects of pesticides on catalysts with and without irradiation, GB-CeO 2 was successfully applied to recognize mixed toxic pesticides.