Revealing the Adsorption and Decomposition of EP-PTCDI on a Cerium Oxide Surface

Jinping Hu; Kongchao Shen; Zhaofeng Liang; Jinbang Hu; Haoliang Sun; Huan Zhang; Qiwei Tian; Peng Wang; Zheng Jiang; Han Huang; Fei Song

doi:10.1021/acsomega.9b00696

Revealing the Adsorption and Decomposition of EP-PTCDI on a Cerium Oxide Surface

ACS Omega. 2019 Oct 25;4(19):17939-17946. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.9b00696. eCollection 2019 Nov 5.

Authors

Jinping Hu^{1

2}, Kongchao Shen^{1

3}, Zhaofeng Liang^{1

2}, Jinbang Hu^{1

2}, Haoliang Sun^{1

2}, Huan Zhang^{1

2}, Qiwei Tian^{1

4}, Peng Wang⁵, Zheng Jiang^{1

2

1}, Han Huang⁴, Fei Song^{1

2

1}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Interfacial Physics and Technology, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, and Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Zhangjiang Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201204, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100100, China.
³ Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
⁴ School of Physics Science and Electronics, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
⁵ Department of Applied Physics, College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China.

Abstract

Cerium oxide has constantly attracted intense attention during the past decade both in research and industry as an appealing catalyst or a noninert support for catalysts, for instance, in the water-gas shift reaction and hydrogenation of the ketone group. Herein, the cerium oxide surface has been chosen to investigate the adsorption and decomposition behaviors of the N,N'-bis(1-ethylpropyl)-perylene-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxdiimide (EP-PTCDI) molecule by photoelectron spectroscopy. As expected, EP-PTCDI molecules self-assemble on the cerium oxide surface comprising both trivalent and tetravalent cerium at room temperature. Interestingly, the EP-PTCDI molecule exhibits selective adsorption on cerium oxide after the heating treatment. It was found that the ketone group of EP-PTCDI first undergoes hydrogenation after annealing to 400 °C, which is probably related to the fact that high temperature annealing provides sufficient thermal energy to trigger the reaction between the ketone group and trivalent cerium. Furthermore, EP-PTCDI molecules are discovered to start to decompose hierarchically on the ceria substrate from annealing at 400 °C due to the strong molecule-substrate interaction and the effective catalysis by the trivalent cerium, whereas the decomposition sequence of functional groups is revealed to be, first, the ethyl propyl group (-C₅H₉), followed by the hydrogenated ketone (alcohols) group. Finally, our study may provide a new platform for the fundamental understanding of complex organic reactions on the cerium oxide surface.