Stable copper superatom breaks carbon dioxide electroreduction records

A rare copper nanocluster has been synthesised that behaves as a ‘superatom’. The Chinese team hopes it will unlock copper’s long-promised potential for sustainable carbon-to-fuel chemistry, turning carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals.

‘Superatom’ describes clusters of atoms that exhibit the properties of single elements or, in some cases, entirely new qualities. ‘These clusters can be made of potentially hundreds of atoms, but behave electronically, like a single large atom,’ explains Quan-Ming Wang at Tsinghua University.