Face-centered cubic structured RuCu hollow urchin-like nanospheres enable remarkable hydrogen evolution catalysis

Ruthenium(Ru)is one of the most promising metals for its versatility in driving a wide range of catalytic reactions.However,owing to the intrinsic preference of hexagonal close-packed(hcp)phase for bulk Ru,currently,it is still challenging to construct Ru-based nanomaterials with face-centered-cubic(fcc)phase for optimizing their performance towards potential applications.Herein,we report a facile wet-chemical method to directly create unconventional fcc-structured Ru-copper hollow urchin-like nanospheres(fcc-RuCu HUNSs)as a class of efficient pH-universal hydrogen evolution reaction(HER)electrocatalyst.Interestingly,this synthetic strategy can be expanded to prepare other fcc-Ru-based alloy nanomaterials.Significantly,the novel fcc-RuCu HUNSs exhibit superior HER performance with the overpotential of only 25,34,40,and 26 m V to reach the current density of 10 mA cm^(-2)in 0.5 M H_(2)SO_(4),0.05 M H_(2)SO_(4),0.1 M KOH,and 1 M KOH,respectively,much lower than those of hcpRuCu HUNSs and commercial Pt/C.Density functional theory(DFT)calculations further indicate that their excellent pH-universal HER performance results from the optimized adsorption free energy of H and work functions.Our work highlights the importance of phase control to design high-efficiency nanocatalysts for relevant catalytic reactions in energy conversion.