ABSTRACT
The impact of surface reactions on society is often overlooked. How many of us pause to appreciate integrated circuitry before checking email? Yet, without growth and etching reactions, the manufacturing of integrated circuits would be quite impractical. Or consider that in 1996, the United States alone consumed 123 billion gallons of gasoline [1]. The production of this gasoline from crude petroleum is accomplished by the petroleum industry using heterogeneous catalytic reactions. Even the control of automobile exhaust emissions, an obvious environmental concern, is achieved via catalytic reactions using ‘three-way catalysts’ that eliminate hydrocarbons, CO and NOx . The study of these types of surface reactions and others is an exciting and rapidly changing field. Nevertheless, much remains to be understood at the atomic level regarding the interaction of gases and liquids with solid surfaces.
