ChemInform Abstract: Structural Investigations of Electrode Surfaces

Abstract

A survey is given of the various ways in which information on the structure of electrode surfaces and their influence on the electrochemical behavior, especially on adsorption reactions, can be obtained. The techniques now at hand include a wide variety of spectroscopic methods, which are applicable in-situ, such as reflectance spectroscopy over a broad range of photon energy, second harmonic generation, various X-ray diffraction techniques and, most recently, scanning tunneling microscopy, which highlights the possibility of acquiring atomic-scale resolution. In addition, the emersion of electrodes and their subsequent transfer into a vacuum chamber for detailed surface-structural studies, e.g., by electron diffraction methods, is now widely used in electrochemistry, since it has been shown that electrodes can, in fact, be emersed with their electric double layer apparently intact. The combined venture incorporating all these techniques should lead to a truly microscopic description of electrochemical processes. The way in which structural information, even on an atomic scale, can be derived, is illustrated here by a few selected examples.