Principal Investigator Sylvia Ceyer
Knowledge of these microscopic origins for the pressure gap has allowed us to develop a scheme to bypass the high pressure requirement simply by raising the energy of the incident molecule or collisionally inducing dissociation. We have used the former trick to synthesize and identify spectroscopically, by high resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy, adsorbed CH3 radicals, benzene from CH4 over a Ni(111) catalyst, bulk H in Ni, and demonstrated the hydrogenation of adsorbed methyl, ethylene and acetylene by bulk H.