Mechanically Tailored Bending and Twisting of Metallic Nanowires toward Efficient Catalysis

Noble metal nanocatalysts are central to hydrogen evolution and nitroarene reduction, yet their performance is limited by a scarcity of active sites, unfavorable facet exposure, and ligand blocking. Strain engineering offers a route to modulate their electronic structure, but precisely exposing strained interfaces remains challenging. Here we introduce a mechanical force-driven strategy that enables programmable deformation of ultrathin metallic nanowires. Controlled bending and twisting exposes high-energy crystal facets and generates abundant grain boundaries. The curvature <i>R</i> (<i>R</i> = <i>L</i>₀/<i>L</i>₁) directly correlates with electronic structure modulation and catalytic activity. Highly curved Pt nanowires exhibit markedly enhanced performance, with reduced overpotentials for hydrogen evolution and a 10-fold increase in kinetic rate constants for nitroarene reduction. This rapid (<60 s), robust, and broadly applicable approach establishes a direct link between bending-induced strain, lattice rearrangement, and catalytic enhancement, offering a generalizable pathway for designing high-performance nanocatalysts across noble-metal and multimetallic systems.