Balancing elementary steps for boosting alkaline hydrogen evolution

Recently, Professors Jin-Song Hu and Li-Jun Wan from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators designed the nanocrystals with tunable Ni/NiO heterosurfaces to target Volmer and Heyrovsky/Tafel steps in the alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and discovered that such bicomponent active sites on the surface should be balanced for promoting HER performance.