Nanostructure Science and Technology - World Technology ...

4. High Surface Area Materials 53
Figure 4.1. Schematic drawing of the experimental setup used in Göteborg for studies of
chemical reactivity and/or sticking probability of various molecules with the clusters. The
production of clusters is via laser vaporization of metal substrates and detection via photoionization
time-of-flight mass spectrometry (A. Rosen, University of Göteborg, Sweden).
A typical objective of nanoscale catalyst research is to produce a material
with exceedingly high selectivity at high yield in the reaction product or
product state, i.e., chemicals by design, with the option of altering the
product or product state simply by changing the surface functionality,
elemental composition, or number of atoms in the catalyst particle. For
instance, new catalysts with increasing specificity are now being fabricated
in which the stoichiometry may be altered due to size restrictions or in which
only one or two spatial dimensions are of nanometer size.
Five recent examples where nanocrystalline metallic and ceramic
materials have been successfully investigated for catalytic applications are
discussed below (Trudeau and Ying 1996).