Nowadays, heterogeneous catalysis plays a prominent role. The majority of industrial chemical processes, involving the manufacturing of commodity chemicals, pharmaceuticals, clean fuels, etc., as well as pollution abatement technologies, have a common catalytic origin. As catalysis proceeds at the surface, it is of paramount importance to gain insight into the fundamental understanding of local surface chemistry, which in turn governs the catalytic performance. The deep understanding at the atomic level of a catalyst surface could pave the way towards the design of novel catalytic systems for real-life energy and environmental applications.
Thanks to surface science we can obtain profound insight into the structure of a surface, the chemical state of active sites, the interfacial reactivity, the way molecules bind and react, the role of surface defects and imperfections (e.g., surface oxygen vacancies), and the mode of action of various surface promoters/poisons. Τo elucidate the aforementioned surface phenomena, sophisticated techniques in combination with theoretical studies are necessary to reveal the composition and the structure/morphology of the surface as well as the chemical entity of adsorbed species. Moreover, time-resolved methods are required to investigate the dynamic phenomena occurring at the surface, such as adsorption/desorption, diffusion and chemical reactions. Under this perspective, it was clearly revealed, based on the recently published review articles by the Guest Editor, that the complete elucidation of a catalytic phenomenon (e.g., metal-support interactions [1]) or the fundamental understanding of a specific catalytic process (e.g., N2O decomposition [2]) requires a holistic approach involving the combination of advanced ex situ experimental and theoretical studies with in situ operando studies
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