Catalysts are vital pillars of modern chemistry and are used in over 80% of industrial processes to boost the rate of a desired specific reaction. Various earth-abundant and non-precious metals (alloys, chalcogenides, carbides, pnictides, borides, phosphates, borophosphates, phosphides, phosphites, phosphonates, and intermetallics) and metal-free-based electrocatalysts have extensively been employed in a range of industrially important reactions including electro-, photo-, and thermalcatalysis. Our research is focussed on the designing of low cost, extremely efficient and stable single atom catalysts (SACs) for various energy applications.

To cope with the ever-increasing demand for sustainable and clean energy fuel, hydrogen has emerged as the most promising future fuel that holds great potential to complement environmentally hazardous and non-renewable fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Water electrolysis is the most preferred route to generate hydrogen. However, it is a kinetically sluggish process that requires catalysts to boost the hydrogen generation rate. In this regard, SACs with well-defined active centers, maximized atom utilization efficiency and unique physicochemical properties holds great potential as an HER electrocatalysts. Our research group works on the immobilization of noble single atoms on various supports, namely carbon materials, transition metal dichalcogenides via hydrothermal, electrodeposition and wet chemistry route to fabricate SACs to improve the overall HER activity, selectivity, and stability. Then, to further evaluate their HER performance by measuring essential HER parameters including overpotential, Tafel slope, exchange current density, stability, etc.