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Questioning the rate law in the analysis of water oxidation catalysis on haematite photoanodes

Nature Chemistry volume 12, pages 1097–1098 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 09 November 2020

The Original Article was published on 21 October 2019

arising from C. A. Mesa et al. Nature Chemistry https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0347-1 (2020)

The Article1 deals with the mechanism of water photooxidation on metal–oxide photoanodes, focusing particularly on haematite. The authors claimed that haematite is able to access a reaction mechanism that is third order in surface hole density \(( {h_{\mathrm{s}}^ + })\). We argue that the reaction is first order and independent of \(( {h_{\mathrm{s}}^ + })\). This debate may be helpful to understand the actual mechanism of water photooxidation on the photoanodes.

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Fig. 1: Mechanistic analyses of water oxidation on α-Fe2O3.

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The authors declare that all the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper. Source data are provided with this paper.

References

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Acknowledgements

W. Leng acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project 50971116).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Yuquan Campus, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Shufeng Zhang & Wenhua Leng

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  1. Shufeng Zhang
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  2. Wenhua Leng
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Contributions

S.Z. contributed and analysed the data. W.L. found the problem in the Article1 and conceived the manuscript. Both authors discussed the results, co-wrote and commented on the manuscript. W.L. contributed more to this work.

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Correspondence to Wenhua Leng.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Source Data Fig. 1

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Zhang, S., Leng, W. Questioning the rate law in the analysis of water oxidation catalysis on haematite photoanodes. Nat. Chem. 12, 1097–1098 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-020-00569-y

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