The rise of electrochemical NAPXPS operated in the soft X-ray regime exemplified by the oxygen evolution reaction on IrO<sub><i>x</i></sub> electrocatalysts
Juan Jesús Velasco Vélez, Denis Bernsmeier, Travis E. Jones, Patrick Zeller, Emilia A. Carbonio, Cheng‐Hao Chuang, Lorenz J. Falling, Verena Streibel, Rik V. Mom, Adnan Hammud, Michael Hävecker, Rosa Arrigo, Eugen Stotz, Thomas Lunkenbein, Axel Knop‐Gericke, Ralph Krähnert, Robert Schlögl
Abstract
based electrocatalysts. We found that the electrified solid-liquid interface is composed of different oxygen species, where the terminal oxygen atoms on iridium are the active species, yielding the formation of peroxo species and, finally, dioxygen as the reaction product. Thus, the oxygen-oxygen bond formation is dominated by peroxo species formation along the reaction pathway. Furthermore, the methodologies discussed here open up opportunities to investigate electrified solid-liquid interfaces in a multitude of electrochemical processes with unprecedented speciation capabilities, which are not accessible by one-dimensional X-ray spectroscopies.