Potential-Programmed Operando Ensembles Govern Nitrate Electroreduction

Abstract

Electrocatalyst surfaces continuously reorganize on the timescale of catalytic turnover, obscuring the identification of active sites under operando conditions and hindering rational catalyst design. Here, we resolve the operando Cu(111) electrolyte interface for nitrate-to-ammonia electroreduction (NO3RR) via a multiscale modeling framework accelerated by a coverage-aware machine-learning potential. Rather than a single "average coverage" site, the working interface is a potential-gated statistical ensemble of 34 interconverting adsorbate motifs between -0.10 and -1.00 V (vs. SHE). Potential-driven shifts in motif populations produce a volcano-shaped activity trend peaking at -0.70 V, where the site-normalized turnover frequency reaches 0.015 s-1 with nearly 100% Faradaic efficiency to ammonia. The activation barriers across >150 transition states collapse into a single linear relationship with the excess charge on the reacting Cu atoms ({\Delta}qCu), identifying interfacial charge redistribution as a unifying kinetic descriptor. The maximum activity arises not from uniform moderate coverage but from a 2NO/2NH2 quadrilateral microensemble that tunes {\Delta}qCu to an intermediate value, simultaneously lowering the N-O cleavage and N-H formation barriers. Reconceptualizing "coverage" as an ensemble of local microenvironments decouples thermodynamic stability from catalytic productivity. This perspective furnishes a parameter-free strategy by controlling motif populations and interfacial charge via the potential to program high-coverage electrocatalysis beyond the NO3RR.