Magnetic Enhancement for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction on Ferromagnetic MoS2 Catalyst

Numerous efforts in improving the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance of transition metal dichalcogenides mostly focus on active sites exposing, vacancy engineering, and phase engineering. However, little room is left for improvement in these approaches. It should be noted that efficient electron transfer also plays a crucial role in catalytic activity. In this work, by employment of an external vertical magnetic field, ferromagnetic bowl-like MoS₂ flakes can afford electrons transmitting easily from a glassy carbon electrode to active sites to drive HER, and thus perform magnetic HER enhancement. The ferromagnetic bowl-like MoS₂ flakes with an external vertical magnetic field can provide a roughly doubled current density compared to that without an external vertical magnetic field at a constant overpotential of -150 mV. Our work may provide a new pathway to break the bottleneck for further improvement of HER performance and also paves the way to utilize the magnetic enhancement in widely catalytic application.