Cobalt-Porphyrin Catalyzed Electrochemical Reduction of Carbon Dioxide in Water II: Mechanism from First Principles

We apply first principles computational techniques to analyze the two-electron, multi-step, electrochemical reduction of CO2 to CO in water using cobalt porphyrin as a catalyst. Density Functional Theory calculations with hybrid functionals and dielectric continuum solvation are used to determine the steps at which electrons are added. This information is corroborated with ab initio molecular dynamics simulations in an explicit aqueous environment which reveal the critical role of water in stabilizing a key intermediate formed by CO2 bound to cobalt. Using potential of mean force calculations, the intermediate is found to spontaneously accept a proton to form a carboxylate acid group at pH<9.0, and the subsequent cleavage of a C-OH bond to form CO is exothermic and associated with a small free energy barrier. These predictions suggest that the proposed reaction mechanism is viable if electron transfer to the catalyst is sufficiently fast. The variation in cobalt ion charge and spin states during bond breaking, DFT+U treatment of cobalt 3d orbitals, and the need for computing electrochemical potentials are emphasized.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figure

The alkaline transition of cytochrome c revisited: Effects of electrostatic interactions and tyrosine nitration on the reaction dynamics

Here we investigated the effect of electrostatic interactions and of protein tyrosine nitration of mammalian cytochrome c on the dynamics of the so-called alkaline transition, a pH- and redox-triggered conformational change that implies replacement of the axial ligand Met80 by a Lys residue. Using a combination of electrochemical, time-resolved SERR spectroelectrochemical experiments and molecular dynamics simulations we showed that in all cases the reaction can be described in terms of a two steps minimal reaction mechanism consisting of deprotonation of a triggering group followed by ligand exchange. The pK a alk values of the transition are strongly modulated by these perturbations, with a drastic downshift upon nitration and an important upshift upon establishing electrostatic interactions with a negatively charged model surface. The value of pK a alk is determined by the interplay between the acidity of a triggering group and the kinetic constants for the forward and backward ligand exchange processes. Nitration of Tyr74 results in a change of the triggering group from Lys73 in WT Cyt to Tyr74 in the nitrated protein, which dominates the pK a alk downshift towards physiological values. Electrostatic interactions, on the other hand, result in strong acceleration of the backward ligand exchange reaction, which dominates the pK a alk upshift. The different physicochemical conditions found here to influence pK a alk are expected to vary depending on cellular conditions and subcellular localization of the protein, thus determining the existence of alternative conformations of Cyt in vivo.Fil: Oviedo Rouco, Santiago. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Castro, Maria Ana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Álvarez Paggi, Damián Jorge. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Spedalieri, Ana Cecilia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; ArgentinaFil: Tortora, Verónica. Universidad de la República; UruguayFil: Tomasina, Florencia. Universidad de la República; UruguayFil: Radi, Rafael. Universidad de la República; UruguayFil: Murgida, Daniel Horacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química, Física de los Materiales, Medioambiente y Energía; Argentin

Identification of the byproducts of the oxygen evolution reaction on rutile-type oxides under dynamic conditions

Peer reviewedPostprin

Aqueous transition-metal cations as impurities in a wide gap oxide: the Cu(2+)/Cu(+) and Ag(2+)/Ag(+) redox couples revisited.

The interactions of the d electrons of transition-metal aqua ions with the solvent are usually divided in short-range electronic interactions with ligand water molecules and long-range electrostatic interactions with molecules beyond the first coordination shell. This is the rationale behind the cluster continuum and QM/MM methods developed for the computation of the redox potentials. In the density functional theory based molecular dynamics (DFTMD) method, the electronic states of the complex are also allowed to mix with the extended band states of the solvent. Returning to the Cu(+) and Ag(+) oxidation reaction, which has been the subject of DFTMD simulation before, we show that coupling to the valence band states of water is greatly enhanced by the band gap error in the density functional approximation commonly used in DFTMD (the generalized gradient approximation). This effect is analyzed by viewing the solvent as a wide gap oxide and the redox active ions as electronic defects. The errors can be reduced significantly by application of hybrid functionals containing a fraction of Hartree-Fock exchange. These calculations make use of recent progress in DFTMD technology, enabling us to include sp core polarization and Hartree-Fock exchange in condensed-phase model systems.We acknowledge grants from the National Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41002013, 41222015 and 41273074) and Newton International Fellowship program. Further support came from the State Key Laboratory for Mineral Deposits Research in Nanjing University and the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of PR China (No.201228).This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACS at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp506691h

Validating a Density Functional Theory Approach for Predicting the Redox Potentials Associated with Charge Carriers and Excitons in Polymeric Photocatalysts

We compare, for a range of conjugated polymers relevant to water-splitting photocatalysis, the predictions for the redox potentials associated with charge carriers and excitons by a total-energy ΔDFT approach to those measured experimentally. For solid-state potentials, of the different classes of potentials available experimentally for conjugated polymers, the class measured under conditions which are the most similar to those during water splitting, we find a good fit between the ionization potentials predicted using ΔB3LYP and those measured experimentally using photoemission spectroscopy (PES). We also observe a reasonable fit to the more limited data sets of excited-state ionization potentials, obtained from two-photon PES, and electron affinities, measured by inverse PES, respectively. Through a comparison of solid-state potentials with gas phase and solution potentials for a range of oligomers, we demonstrate how the quality of the fit to experimental solid-state data is probably the result of benign error cancellation. We discuss that the good fit for solid-state potentials in vacuum suggests that a similar accuracy can be expected for calculations on solid-state polymers interfaced with water. We also analyze the quality of approximating the ΔB3LYP potentials by orbital energies. Finally, we discuss what a comparison between experimental and predicted potentials teaches us about conjugated polymers as photocatalysts, focusing specifically on the large exciton-binding energy in these systems and the mechanism of free charge carrier generation

Unprecedented inequivalent metal coordination environments in a mixed-ligand dicobalt complex

Bimetallic complexes of the transition metals containing mixed diimine and dithiolate ligands are of fundamental interest on account of their intriguing electronic properties. Almost always, such complexes are isolated as species in which both the metal centers are in identical coordination environments - this means that the two metals often have identical redox properties. In contrast, mixed-diimine/dithiolate bimetallic complexes of the first row transition metals where the two metals are in dissimilar coordination environments are exceedingly rare, and are only known for nickel. Herein, we report the first ever example of a mixed-diimine/dithiolate dicobalt complex where the two cobalt centers are in different coordination environments. The synthesis of this compound is straightforward, and produces a complex in which the two cobalt centers display very different redox properties

Water-in-salt environment reduces the overpotential for reduction of of CO2 to CO2 : in ionic liquid/water mixtures

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We are grateful for funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos 21861132015, 21991151, 21991150, 22021001, 91745103, 92161113, 91945301 and 3502Z20203027). The support of the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2015-0400) is gratefully acknowledged. We are also very grateful to the reviewers for their helpful suggestions to improve readability.Peer reviewedPostprin

Redox potentials and acidity constants from density functional theory based molecular dynamics.

CONSPECTUS: All-atom methods treat solute and solvent at the same level of electronic structure theory and statistical mechanics. All-atom computation of acidity constants (pKa) and redox potentials is still a challenge. In this Account, we review such a method combining density functional theory based molecular dynamics (DFTMD) and free energy perturbation (FEP) methods. The key computational tool is a FEP based method for reversible insertion of a proton or electron in a periodic DFTMD model system. The free energy of insertion (work function) is computed by thermodynamic integration of vertical energy gaps obtained from total energy differences. The problem of the loss of a physical reference for ionization energies under periodic boundary conditions is solved by comparing with the proton work function computed for the same supercell. The scheme acts as a computational hydrogen electrode, and the DFTMD redox energies can be directly compared with experimental redox potentials. Consistent with the closed shell nature of acid dissociation, pKa estimates computed using the proton insertion/removal scheme are found to be significantly more accurate than the redox potential calculations. This enables us to separate the DFT error from other sources of uncertainty such as finite system size and sampling errors. Drawing an analogy with charged defects in solids, we trace the error in redox potentials back to underestimation of the energy gap of the extended states of the solvent. Accordingly the improvement in the redox potential as calculated by hybrid functionals is explained as a consequence of the opening up of the bandgap by the Hartree-Fock exchange component in hybrids. Test calculations for a number of small inorganic and organic molecules show that the hybrid functional implementation of our method can reproduce acidity constants with an uncertainty of 1-2 pKa units (0.1 eV). The error for redox potentials is in the order of 0.2 V.J. C. thanks Emmanuel College at Cambridge for research fellowship. Dr. Aron Cohen is ackowledged for helpful discussions about density functionals and the delocalization er- ror. X.-D. L. thanks National Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41273074 and 41222015), the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of PR China (No. 201228) and Newton International Fellow Program for nancial support. We thank HECToR and UKCP consortium for computing time.This is the accepted manuscript. It will be embargoed until 12 months after publication by ACS. The final version is available from http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar500268