Highlights

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¹H solid-state NMR spectroscopy can be applied to investigate different H species at very low concentration in ZnO.

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Two ¹H NMR signals are assigned to interstitial H (H_i) and H substituting for oxygen ions (H_O).

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The amounts of H_i and H_O species are found to vary upon heating in both bulk and nanosized ZnO samples.

Abstract

Nanostructured oxides find multiple uses in a diverse range of applications including catalysis, energy storage, and environmental management, their higher surface areas, and, in some cases, electronic properties resulting in different physical properties from their bulk counterparts. Developing structure-property relations for these materials requires a determination of surface and subsurface structure. Although microscopy plays a critical role owing to the fact that the volumes sampled by such techniques may not be representative of the whole sample, complementary characterization methods are urgently required. We develop a simple nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) strategy to detect the first few layers of a nanomaterial, demonstrating the approach with technologically relevant ceria nanoparticles. We show that the ¹⁷O resonances arising from the first to third surface layer oxygen ions, hydroxyl sites, and oxygen species near vacancies can be distinguished from the oxygen ions in the bulk, with higher-frequency ¹⁷O chemical shifts being observed for the lower coordinated surface sites. H₂¹⁷O can be used to selectively enrich surface sites, allowing only these particular active sites to be monitored in a chemical process. ¹⁷O NMR spectra of thermally treated nanosized ceria clearly show how different oxygen species interconvert at elevated temperature. Density functional theory calculations confirm the assignments and reveal a strong dependence of chemical shift on the nature of the surface. These results open up new strategies for characterizing nanostructured oxides and their applications.