Probing the Kinetics and Dynamics at Surfaces using Ion Imaging methods

I will introduce the use of slice imaging to measure catalytic rates for site-specific elementary reactions thus offering remarkable opportunities to advance our fundamental understanding of heterogeneous catalysis. We call this approach Velocity Resolved Kinetics (VRK). This strategy makes the formidable task of describing site-specific chemical reaction mechanisms and elementary rates in heterogeneous catalysis facile, while its necessity we justified on the prototypical CO oxidation reaction on Pt. I will show examples of reactions involving atoms H, O, N, and how to measure important factors that influence the kinetics of elementary reactions at surfaces, e.g. the chemical nature of the catalyst and the geometry of the active sit. VRK is a "bottom-up" approach to catalysis, i.e., building and understanding complex heterogeneous chemical catalysis, from the site-specific kinetics of the elementary building block reactions. Our measurements, serve for benchmarking first principles calculations of reaction rates in surface chemistry. Our methodology measures the kinetics in the microsecond to millisecond regime with temperatures in the 100 to 1000 K range, i.e, conditions more relevant to industrial conditions.