Innovative methods to study surfaces and molecular adsorbates

At the Fritz-Haber-Institut (FHI) in Berlin, new experimental methods to characterise, to control and to spectroscopically investigate molecules in the gas phase, in liquids and on surfaces are developed and exploited. Two methods that have been pioneered under the guidance of H.-J. Freund to understand the relation between structure and chemical activity in model systems for heterogeneous catalysts, that is, on single crystalline substrates, are presented here: Surface Action Spectroscopy (SAS) and high-speed spiral STM (scanning tunneling microscopy).