The surface chemistry of catalysis

Heterogeneous catalysis accelerates reactions important to transportation, environmental and energy processes. Improving our basic understanding of surface chemistry is crucial to overcoming the current trial and error approaches to finding new catalysts and to explain newly discovered phenomena in nature. Our research develops improved means of observing reactions important to catalysis, providing precise data against which new theories of surface chemistry can be developed. Our aim is to understand surface chemistry on the atomic scale and ultimately to predict new catalysts from theory.