U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research: An Approach to Tailored Metal Catalysts Involving Single and Multi-Metal Surface Sites

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This award provides support for a two year cooperative project on metal catalysts, between a group from Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Delaware, lead by Professor Bruce C Gates and a group from the Department of Chemistry, University of Tokyo, Japan, lead by Professor Yasuhiro Iwasawa. Metals are some of the most important catalysts used in technology, and the common form of the catalyst used in practice consists of small metal particles dispersed on a high-area support. These metals, however, are non-uniform in nature and therefore difficult to understand fully. This project will involve the bringing together of two complementary approaches to the investigation of metal catalysts developed by the teams in the US and Japan, namely the single-crystal surface science approach, and the surface organometallic chemistry approach. The catalysts to be studied will be made from several precursors on single crystals of MgO and Mg with a few layers of oxygen. These catalysts will then be converted to rhenium subcarbonyls, intended to be isolated mononuclear groups, pairs of these groups, and ensembles of three of these groups, respectively. Finally the samples will be treated to remove the carbonyl ligands and reduce the metal with minimum perturbation of the nuclearity. The structures at each stage will be characterized using a number of physical methods including scanning tunnel microscopy, infrared spectroscopy and ultrahigh vacuum techniques. Both Professor Gates and Professor Iwasawa are highly competent scientists with reputations for being innovators in catalyst design and preparation. This project should yield precise structural information characterizing the highly dispersed metal entities, as well as the metal support interface, and hopefully the results will demonstrate the relationship between the structure and catalytic properties of these materials.