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Acknowledgements This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (grant numbers 51622203 and 51572007), the Youth 1000-Talent
Program of China and the 111 Project (grant number B17002). X.Z. also thanks Shenzhen
Basic Research Projects (grant number JCYJ20170407155608882), the China Postdoctoral
Science Foundation (grant number 2018M631458) and the Development and Reform
Commission of Shenzhen Municipality for the development of the “Low-Dimensional
Materials and Devices” Discipline, Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research
Team Program (grant number 2017ZT07C341). We thank the Shanghai Synchrotron
Radiation Facility and Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility for support. We thank X. Chen,
Q. Zhang, W. Zhou and M. Li for help with the TEM analysis; S. Chen and Y. Lin for help with
the EXAFS analysis; and L. Ma for suggestions.
Author contributions S.Y., S.L. and P.M.A. supervised the project. S.Y. and Z.D. designed and
carried out all of the experiments. S.Z. and X.Z. carried out the density functional theory
calculations. S.W. and B.L. performed the scanning electron microscope, TEM and X-ray
diffraction measurements. B.L. carried out the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman
analysis. L.S. contributed to the XANES and EXAFS measurements. Z.D. performed the atomic
force microscopy. Z.D. and Y.G. designed the film electrodes and carried out the electrical and
electrocatalytic measurements. All authors discussed the results and assisted during
manuscript preparation.
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Supplementary information is available for this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-
1904-x.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.Y. or P.M.A.
Peer review information Nature thanks Per Eklund, Wei Sun Leong and the other, anonymous,
reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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