Regulating Photocatalysis by Spin-State Manipulation of Cobalt in Covalent Organic Frameworks

Yun-Nan Gong; Wenhui Zhong; Yang Li; Yunze Qiu; Lirong Zheng; Jun Jiang; Hai-Long Jiang

doi:10.1021/jacs.0c07206

Regulating Photocatalysis by Spin-State Manipulation of Cobalt in Covalent Organic Frameworks

J Am Chem Soc. 2020 Sep 30;142(39):16723-16731. doi: 10.1021/jacs.0c07206. Epub 2020 Sep 16.

Authors

Yun-Nan Gong^{1

2}, Wenhui Zhong³, Yang Li¹, Yunze Qiu¹, Lirong Zheng⁴, Jun Jiang¹, Hai-Long Jiang¹

Affiliations

¹ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P. R. China.
² Key Laboratory of Jiangxi University for Functional Material Chemistry, College of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Gannan Normal University, Ganzhou 341000, P. R. China.
³ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, Shandong 273165, P. R. China.
⁴ Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P. R. China.

PMID: 32894021
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.0c07206

Abstract

While catalysis is highly dependent on the electronic structure of the catalyst, the understanding of catalytic performance affected by electron spin regulation remains challenging and rare. Herein, we have developed a facile strategy to the manipulation of the cobalt spin state over covalent organic frameworks (COFs), COF-367-Co, by simply changing the oxidation state of Co centered in the porphyrin. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations together with experimental results confirm that Co^II and Co^III are embedded in COF-367 with S = 1/2 and 0 spin ground states, respectively. Remarkably, photocatalytic CO₂ reduction results indicate that COF-367-Co^III exhibits favorable activity and significantly enhanced selectivity to HCOOH, accordingly much reduced activity and selectivity to CO and CH₄, in sharp contrast to COF-367-Co^II. The results highlight that the spin-state transition of cobalt greatly regulates photocatalytic performance. Theoretical calculations further disclose that the presence of Co^III in COF-367-Co is preferable to the formation of HCOOH but detrimental to its further conversion, which clearly accounts for its distinctly different photocatalysis over COF-367-Co^II. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on regulating photocatalysis by spin state manipulation in COFs.