European scientists image bimetallic catalyst

摘要

European scientists have imaged a platinum/rhodium alloy surface with atomic resolution and identified the chemical nature of the surface atoms. This may open the way to new techniques for analyzing catalytic surfaces and designing better industrial catalysts. The research was done by Bernhard E. Nieuwenhuys and Peter T. Wouda of Leiden University's Gorlaeus Laboratories in the Netherlands and by Michael Schmid and Peter Varga of the Institute for General Physics of the Technical University of Vienna. Their work, combining scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic emission spectroscopy (AES), will be published soon in Surface Science.