Jürgen Behm: Building Bridges from Surface Science to Catalysis and Fuel Cell Research

Abstract

Jürgen Behm, to whom this special issue of ChemPhysChem is dedicated on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 1 started his career at one of the best places imaginable for a young surface scientist in the late seventies—the laboratory of 2007 Nobel Laureate Gerhard Ertl at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Jürgen Behm′s early research focused on the structure of H and CO adsorbate layers on transition metals and remains a classic work in surface science. However, early on he also developed a major interest in surface reactions, which he pursued during his post-doc sabbatical with Dick Brundle at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Although having worked successfully with a wide variety of techniques, he is arguably best known for scanning tunneling microscopy, notably building up one of the two first instruments of this type in Germany after returning to the Ertl group in 1984. After Jürgen Behm had accepted a professor position in Munich in 1987, the STM technique became his major work horse. In the following five years, a stream of high-impact publications on atomic-resolution studies of clean and adsorbate-covered metal surfaces as well as on chemical processes at semiconductor surfaces and electrochemical interfaces emerged. These publications have been cumulatively cited more than 5000 times by now. In 1992 Jürgen Behm was ready for the next big leap. Moving to the newly created chair of surface science and catalysis at the University Ulm, he set out to build a group that covered all aspects of heterogeneous reactions, from atomic-scale studies of the surface reactivity of planar model systems up to real supported catalysts. In particular, he focused on electrochemical and gas-phase reactions relevant for low-temperature fuel cells—a topic for which he is nowadays as well known as for STM. Throughout his career, Jürgen Behm’s work has been characterized by utmost scientific rigor as well as by a great willingness to cross boundaries between different approaches, such as fundamental studies and applied research, and different disciplines, such as UHV surface science and electrochemistry, resulting in more than 300 publications. The contributions in this issue, coming from the large international community of his former and current collaborators, reflect the breadth of his interests.