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Abstract

Atomically dispersed precious metals on oxide supports have recently become increasingly interesting catalytic materials. Nonetheless, their non-trivial preparation and limited thermal and environmental stability constitutes an issue for their potential applications. Here we demonstrate that an oxygen plasma pre-treatment of the ceria (CeO₂ ) surface serves to anchor Pt single atoms, making them active and resistant towards sintering in the CO oxidation reaction. Through a combination of experimental results obtained on well-defined CeO₂ films and theory, we show that the O₂ plasma causes surface nanostructuring and the formation of surface peroxo (O₂^2-) species, favoring the uniform and dense distribution of isolated strongly bonded Pt²⁺ atoms. The promotional effect of the plasma treatment was further demonstrated on the powder Pt/CeO₂ catalysts. We believe that plasma functionalization can be applied to other metal/oxide systems to achieve tunable and stable catalysts with a high density of active sites.