Co@CoO chiral nanostructures enabling efficient oxygen electrocatalysis by modulated spin-polarization

Chiral L-type Co@CoO catalyst (Co@CoO-L) controls the spin arrangement of reaction intermediates through the CISS effect during the catalytic reaction, achieving excellent oxygen electrocatalytic and Zn-air battery performance. [Display omitted] •A chiral Co@CoO catalyst (Co@CoO-L) was demonstrated to have excellent oxygen electrocatalytic properties.•The interfacial coupling between metal Co and oxide CoO provides fast charge transfer pathways and reaction kinetics.•The Co@CoO-L catalyst induces parallel spin alignment of OH* through the CISS effect, which promotes O2 (3Σ).•This study opens a new way to manipulate the spin to improve the oxygen precipitation efficiency. The sluggish kinetics of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) frequently hinder advances in Zn-air battery-dependent technologies. In this study, the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect was employed to achieve spin alignment, resulting in a reduction in the reaction overpotential for chiral nanocatalysts compared to their compositionally similar achiral counterparts. Moreover, we demonstrated that chiral L-type Co@CoO catalysts (Co@CoO-L) could achieve outstanding oxygen electrocatalytic performances, overcoming thermodynamic limitations, by manipulating the spin alignment of the reaction intermediates during the catalytic reaction. Zn-air batteries assembled with Co@CoO-L exhibited excellent performances, including a high specific capacity (839.5 mA h g−1 @ 10 mA cm−2), large open-circuit voltage (1.47 V), and long-term cycling stability (800 h). This work provides new insights into the construction excellent catalysts by exploiting chiral-induced spin selectivity.