Studies on the Adsorption of Gases on Clean Metal Surfaces with the Aid of Field-Emission and Field-Ion Microscope Techniques

Studies on the adsorption of gases such as xenon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide on the surface of a single crystal of tungsten with the aid of field-emission and field-ion microscopy have, in the past few years, led to new, fundamental insights into chemisorption and heterogeneous catalysis. Important phenomena which were discoverd and elucidated by these techniques include the pronounced face specificity of the adsorption, the fact that several different adsorption complexes of a gas are found on one and the same crystal face, and the rearrangement of the surface atoms through chemisorption. Many of the interpretations thus gained for the systems studied can also be generalized for other chemisorption complexes.