Professor Wang Rongming, head of the Advanced Materials Fabrication and Characterization team, has published a paper on News & Views, "The Dynamics of the Peel", in Nature Catalysis 3 (2020), pp. 333-334, to overcome the difficulty in understanding the surface structure of catalysts within the current reaction environment. In the paper he makes comments on the thesis "Reversible Loss of Core-Shell Structure for Ni-Au Bimetallic Nanoparticles during CO2 Hydrogenation" recently pubished in the same journal, and points out that this reaction reveals the effective surface for real-time evolution of the Ni-Au bimetallic catalyst during the catalytic process, which will not olny give people a more in-depth understanding of the catalyst’s reaction mechanism, but also promote the application of in-situ characterization methods in the study of material structures during reaction processes. He proposes that similar phenomena may also appear in other bimetallic nanoparticle systems and transition metal-semiconductor heterostructures. Under proper reaction conditions, the loss or formation of core-shell structure driven by dynamic atom diffusion may occur. This work combines a variety of advanced in-situ technologies to provide inspiration for the study of nucleation process, crystal growth, crystal structure evolution and catalytic crystal deactivation process. He also suggests in the paper that the difference between the catalyst itself outside the reaction environment and during the reaction is obvious, which fully illustrates the role of in-situ characterization. In the future, this in-situ characterization method might not be limited to solid-gas reaction studies, but could be applied to reveal the kinetics of liquid-solid systems, too.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-020-0451-z

The Advanced Materials Fabrication and Characterization team has built a first-class ambient atmosphere spherical aberration correction transmission electron microscope, and developed an in-situ characterization method for functional materials under multi-field coupling. The team is committed to exploring high-throughput characterization methods for the structure and performance evolution of materials under simulated environmental atmospheres and operating conditions, and promoting the application of advanced functional materials in the fields of information, energy, etc..