Description:

Professor Theo Kitsopoulos, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences 

Title: Velocity Resolved Kinetics:  A new tool for heterogeneous catalysis that measures reaction rates for elementary reactions and identifies active sties

Abstract: 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 (Nature 2018) 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 surf

Bio: Prof. Theo Kitsopoulos is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, in Göttingen Germany, and also a Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Crete.  He is originally from Chicago, and his undergraduate education was at UIC, where he graduated in 1986. He received his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1991, where he worked with Dan Neumark. After a postdoc at Sandia Laboratories in Livermore, CA, he moved to Crete in 1994.  His research has been at the MPI since 2013, and he has focused on novel imaging techniques for studying chemical dynamics and kinetics for such processes as heterogeneous catalysis and photocatalysis.   

The Center for Catalysis and Surface Science (CCSS) is a strategic research center within the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN). CCSS promotes interdisciplinary research fundamental to the discovery and atomistically-controlled synthesis of catalysts that optimize the sustainability of industrial and consumer goods.