| AVS 58th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| In Situ Spectroscopy and Microscopy Focus Topic | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session IS+AS+SS-TuM |
| Session: | In Situ Studies of Organic and Soft Materials and Liquid-Solid Interfaces |
| Presenter: | Carlos Escudero, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
| Authors: | M. Salmeron, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory C. Escudero, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Surfaces play a fundamental role in many of today's frontier topics, such as clean and renewable energies, efficient and highly selective chemical processes (green catalysis), high capacity rechargeable batteries and fuel cells, and also environmental problems. To advance our For this it is imperative to develop new fundamental approaches to the study of the interface of solid materials with gases, liquids and solids, because it is in these environments that crucial processes occur that need to be understood to enable game-changing discoveries.
One way to control the structure of interfaces and their properties is through the design of materials of nanoscale dimensions, with specific shape, size and composition. It is equally imperative to develop and use techniques for in situ atomic level structural and spectroscopic characterization of the interfaces. New advances in instrumentation are fulfilling this need. I will illustrate this with examples from research carried out in my laboratory, which include scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), photoelectron and x-ray absorption spectroscopies (PES) under ambient conditions, for studies of catalyst models, thin films, single crystals and nanoparticles, for applications in catalysis and electrochemistry. The results obtained so far demonstrate that the information obtained with these new techniques is unique and could not have been obtained or extrapolated from other more traditional surface sensitive techniques.