Mutually Enhanced Catalytic Activity of Doped Cobalt in Porous MoS₂ for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

In molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), cobalt (Co) doping is an effective way to introduce catalytic active sites on the basal plane. For improving their capability of electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), it is desirable to produce more active sites and endow them with highly electrocatalytic activity. In this work, we used silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanospheres as template to prepare porous Co-doped MoS2 with different Co content. We found that the prepared porous catalyst has improved the catalytic performance. Furthermore, the increase in Co content not only increases the number of active sites, but also can improve the activity for each Co atom. First-principle calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) suggest that this mutually enhanced activity originates from the shift of the density of state (DOS) of the vertical d[Formula: see text] orbital near the Fermi energy level caused by the interaction among the Co atoms.