Abstract
The atoms at the surfaces of materials represent the frontier separating the bulk from the surrounding medium. Over the last decades, scientists have intensely studied the structure and properties of surfaces with the goal of understanding and improving the electronic and chemical properties of materials. The surface–medium interaction determines wetting, friction, chemical, biological, and electronic properties. The activity of catalysts, phenomena occurring in water droplets and particles in the atmosphere, and the electronic properties of semiconductor devices are direct consequences of surface-environment interactions. While the need to pursue studies in the normal environment that surrounds a material has always been recognized, the techniques used in the past have only partially fulfilled this need, as most of them work best under high vacuum conditions. My research over the last 10 years has focused on discovering the structure of a surface and its dynamics in real life—in everyday environments. This required the development of new techniques and methods. I present some of the new tools developed in my laboratory and new properties that were discovered by their application in the areas of environmental science, surface chemistry, and catalysis.
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Acknowledgments
This is the work of a large number of students and postdoctoral researchers in my group and of collaborations with many colleagues in various fields, which would be long and difficult to mention here. Their names appear in the many publications that have resulted from it and are cited here. I am fortunate to have enjoyed the support of the Laboratory Director and of the Advanced Light Source, the Berkeley Synchrotron, during the development and commissioning stages of the APPES project. I also want to thank the Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering of the United States, currently under Contract No. DE-AC02–05CH11231, for its support of my research for more than 30 years.
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The following article is an edited transcript of the MRS Medal Award Lecture, presented by Miquel Salmeron on November 29, 2012, at the 2012 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston. The MRS Medal is awarded for a specific outstanding recent discovery or advancement that has a major impact on the progress of a materials-related field. Salmeron received the award “for his contribution to the molecular level understanding of material surfaces under ambient conditions of gas pressure and temperature, made possible by the development and application of Ambient Pressure Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (APPES), which revealed the chemical structure of liquids, catalysts surfaces and nanoparticles during environmental reaction conditions.”
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Salmeron, M. Physics and chemistry of material surfaces under ambient conditions of gases and liquids: What’s new?. MRS Bulletin 38, 650–657 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2013.162
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2013.162