Yan Yin

In the water splitting process for sustainable hydrogen production, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) stands as one of the pivotal half-reactions. Nevertheless, the sluggish four-electron transfer process inherent to OER has emerged as a kinetic bottleneck that impedes water electrolysis. To address this challenge, researchers have been devoting substantial efforts to developing high-performance OER electrocatalysts. Currently, iridium (Ir)-based or ruthenium (Ru)-based oxides are widely acknowledged as benchmark catalysts for OER. However, their scarcity and exorbitant cost render large-scale applications impractical. In recent years, transition metal carbides have garnered extensive attention in the realm of OER electrocatalysts, exhibiting tremendous application prospects owing to their advantages of low cost, high catalytic activity, and excellent stability. This review briefly introduces the fundamental characteristics and synthesis methodologies of transition metal carbides, summarizes the recent research advances in their application as OER catalysts, elaborates on the modification strategies and catalytic mechanisms of transition metal carbide nanomaterials, and finally discusses the challenges confronted by these metal carbides as well as the future research directions.

In this work, a new beam named the Hermite–Gaussian correlated vortex beam (HGCVB) is introduced. The intensity and coherence of this HGCVB in oceanic turbulence are analyzed. The results show that the HGCVB displays a splitting property during propagation, and the HGCVB can evolve into the array profile with hollow center beamlets. The results display that the evolution of the intensity of the HGCVB is manipulated by the coherence length δ₀ and topological charge M. Meanwhile, the array distribution of coherence of the HGCVB in oceanic turbulence can evolve into a one-spot pattern on propagation. The results show that this HGCVB evolves from a Gaussian beam into a beam array composed of beamlets with hollow centers and may have a potential application in oceanic turbulence.