LiteScope Featured in a Langmuir Study on Operando Work-Function Imaging of Catalytic Reactions

Tracking CO oxidation on platinum in real time has always faced the same limitation: secondary electron contrast alone cannot unambiguously tell CO-covered and oxygen-covered regions apart, since SE yield depends on far more than just work function. Standard KPFM, on the other hand, is normally an ambient or vacuum-only technique not built to run inside an SEM chamber alongside a live gas-phase reaction. In this study ("Work-Function-Resolved Imaging of Relaxation Oscillations and Local Kinetic Heterogeneities in CO Oxidation over Platinum Surfaces"), the team led by Miroslav Kolíbal (Brno University of Technology, CEITEC) used a NenoVision LiteScope AFM operated inside an FEI Versa 3D SEM/FIB to run FM-KPFM as a stationary, localized work-function probe directly correlated with simultaneous SEM imaging. This let them assign the propagating reaction fronts unambiguously to CO- and oxygen-covered states, and revealed relaxation-type oscillations at pressures orders of magnitude lower than previously reported.

By turning the AFM tip into a quantitative, nanometer-scale work-function sensor inside a working SEM, LiteScope opens the door to correlative operando studies that neither SEM nor KPFM could deliver alone. We would like to congratulate the authors on this contribution, and we are proud that LiteScope AFM-in-SEM could support their research.

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