Prof. Alec Wodtke Prof. Dr. Alec Michael Wodtke, PhD at University of California Berkeley, USA (1985)Post-doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Gottingen, GermanyProfessor at University of California, Santa Barbara (1988-2010), Full Professor (since 1996)Director and Scientific Member at the MPl for Biophysical Chemistry and Professor for PhysicaChemistry, University of Gottingen (since 2010). Numerous prizes and awards, among them thePresidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the HumboldResearch Award (1998), an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2010), an ERC AdvanceAward-Grant (2017), the Gerhard-Ertl-Lekture Award (2022), a Somorjai Visiting Miller ResearchProfessorship at Berkeley (2023) and the Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech (2025). 报告摘要 Velocity Resolved Kinetics (VRK) is a new method for obtaining highly accurate kinetics datafor surface reactions under high-temperature conditions and with controlled reactant coverages.VRK is sufficiently accurate that meaningful comparisons between experimentally observed andtheoretically predicted reaction rates become possible for the first time. This allows ab initiotheory to serve as a kind of microscope, providing atomically resolved information about reactionmechanisms that can then be tested against experiment. We have recently applied these methodsto reveal the reaction mechanisms of: ammonia oxidation, hydrogen oxidation, and formic acicdecomposition on Palladium catalysts. in each case, we identify all reaction intermediates andthe site-specific rate limiting steps involved in the kinetics. In catalytic hydrogen oxidation, we areable to show that an active configuration only present under reacting conditions is formed due tothe cooperative behavior of several 0-atoms interacting with one another at steps. We speculatethat such active configurations formed by cooperative adsorbate binding play an important rolein many real-world catalytic processes.
