Single-atom catalysis wins first prize of State Natural Science Award

As the invisible engines of modern chemistry, catalysts help produce the gasoline that powers cars, the fertilizers that grow food and the polymers used to make clothing — making them indispensable to modern life.

For more than a century, however, the chemical industry has grappled with a costly inefficiency: Its most effective catalysts rely on rare and expensive precious metals such as platinum and palladium, which are even more expensive than gold. Traditional industrial processes use these metals as nanoparticles or clusters, leaving up to 95 percent of the metal atoms buried and inaccessible to reactants, severely limiting efficiency.

After decades of research to address this challenge, Academician Zhang Tao and his team proposed the concept of Single-atom catalysis in 2011, in which individual metal atoms are isolated and dispersed on a support, with each atom serving as an independent active center. The approach raises atomic utilization from just a few percent to nearly 100 percent.

The breakthrough, first demonstrated with platinum-group metals and later extended to more than 40 elements across the periodic table, received the first prize of the State Natural Science Award in Beijing on Wednesday in recognition of its fundamental role in reshaping the field of catalysis.

"The defining feature of single-atom catalysis is its ability to advance our understanding of catalytic active sites — where reactants are transformed into products — from the conventional micro- and nanoscale to the atomic scale," said Zhang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS.

"Through theoretical studies, we have not only elaborated on the reasons for the stability and dynamics of single-atom catalysts, but also mapped out their role in regulating chemical reactions," said Li Jun, a team member who is also a CAS member and a professor at Tsinghua University.

"This has transformed our understanding from blindly 'stir-frying in a black box' to rationally designing catalytic processes," Li said.

Zhang said the mechanistic understanding has broad applicability, spurring global interest in translating the concept into industrial applications ranging from pharmaceutical manufacturing to the production of fine chemicals. Thousands of research groups from nearly 100 countries and regions have published more than 20,000 papers on the subject.

"This is not merely an academic pursuit, but a strategic response to national needs," Zhang said. "Securing independent control over core catalyst technologies is vital for our energy security and chemical industry."