Abstract
Piezocatalytic upcycling of organic pollutants in wastewater into value-added chemicals rather than CO2 is a dual solution to the environmental and energy crisis, but due to the rapid recombination of piezoelectric electron-hole pairs and the significant reaction barriers for intermediate adsorption and dissociation, which result in a sluggish reaction kinetics. Here, we present a MoSe2 piezocatalyst with lattice strain that collaboratively regulates d-band center and the orbitals hybridization between metal sites and *CO2 as well as *COOH intermediates to achieve rapid conversion of carbon intermediate to critical *COOH intermediates, accelerating the overall carbon reduction with a lower reaction energy barrier. Mechanism study reveals that lattice strain can regulate the local electronic structures of Mo sites, not only improve the adsorption and activation of carbon intermediate, but also inhibit the H* formation from the H2O dissociation, thereby shifting the carbon reduction mechanism from H*-mediated reduction to proton-coupled electron transfer. Simultaneously, peroxymonosulfate acts as an important bridge to promote oxidation reaction and then provide a sufficient carbon source for CO formation. The lattice strained MoSe2 exhibits CO production performance of 155.60 μmol·g−1 and phenol degradation of 100%, 20 mg·L−1. This work deepens the comprehension of how lattice strain influences carbon reduction, and simultaneously offers a feasible approach for recycling real wastewater through fuel production and synchronous advanced treatment.
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The authors declare that all the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article (and Supplementary Information Files), or available from the corresponding author on request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22406089, Q.Z.), (U24A20541 and 22278094, Z.L.), the Major Projects of Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education (23KJA180004, S.Y.), the “Kuncheng Talent” Science and Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Leading Talents Program in Changshu (CSRC22107, S.Y.), the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province (H.H.), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2023M741761, Q.Z.), the Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Synergistic Control and Joint Remediation of Water and Soil Pollution of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (GHBK-2025-02, Q.Z.), and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF (GZC20231138, Q.Z.).
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Q.Z. conceived the idea. Q.Z. carried out the experiments. Q.Z. performed the DFT calculations. Q.Z., Y.S., contributed analytic tools. Q.Z., S.Y., Y.D., H.H., and Z.L. drafted and revised the manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and provided comments during the manuscript preparation.
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Zhong, Q., Sun, Y., Yang, SG. et al. Lattice strain-mediated MoSe2 enable superior piezocatalysis activity for upcycling of organic pollutants. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71183-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71183-8
