Surface chemistry of methanol on different ZnO surfaces studied by vibrational spectroscopy

Abstract

O at elevated temperatures. The high chemical reactivity of both polar surfaces is related to the high abundance of different types of surface defects formed via massive restructuring. Importantly, the reconstructed Zn-ZnO surface exhibits high selectivity for hydrogen production at 520 K, which was not observed for the polar O-ZnO surface. The HREELS data revealed that this low-temperature hydrogen evolution on Zn-ZnO results from methoxy oxidation to a formate species occurring at O-terminated step-edge sites.