Plasmonic sensing of single particle catalysis

Nanoscale heterogeneous catalysts are heavily involved in modern chemical production, as well as in pollution mitigation, and generally advantageous due to their high number of active sites per unit of material. Characterizing... [ view full abstract ]

Nanoscale heterogeneous catalysts are heavily involved in modern chemical production, as well as in pollution mitigation, and generally advantageous due to their high number of active sites per unit of material. Characterizing individual catalyst nanoparticles in operando is a dream of catalysis science because any detrimental ensemble averaging effects could be completely eliminated. For this reason, a number of approaches to study single nanoparticle catalysis are emerging (1). However, a method to directly correlate physical and chemical properties of single catalyst nanoparticles with their catalytic activity is still missing mostly because existing approaches monitor either only the catalyst or the reactants. In this work, we present our efforts towards correlating single particle plasmonic nanospectroscopy (2) and mass spectrometry (MS) to simultaneously monitor the catalyst state and activity/selectivity in operando at atmospheric pressure reaction conditions. As shown in the figure below, we illustrate our concept on the example of hydrogen and carbon monoxide oxidation over Pt and a characterization of the kinetic phase transition (3) on nanoparticles of different size and over different support materials.

References

1.        Sambur JB & Chen P (2014) Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 65(1):395-422.

2.         Syrenova S, et al. (2015) Nature Materials 14:1236-1244.

3.         Larsson EM, Langhammer C, Zoric I, & Kasemo B (2009) Science 326(5956):1091-1094.