Direct Evidence of Dynamic Metal Support Interactions in Co/TiO Catalysts by Near-Ambient Pressure X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy.

The interaction between metal particles and the oxide support, the so-called metal-support interaction, plays a critical role in the performance of heterogenous catalysts. Probing the dynamic evolution of these interactions under reactive gas atmospheres is crucial to comprehending the structure-performance relationship and eventually designing new catalysts with enhanced properties. Cobalt supported on TiO (Co/TiO) is an industrially relevant catalyst applied in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

Organometallic Synthesis of Magnetic Metal Nanoparticles.

Magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) are attractive both for their fundamental properties and for their potential in a variety of applications ranging from nanomedicine and biology to micro/nanoelectronics and catalysis. While these fields are dominated by the use of iron oxides, reduced metal NPs are of interest since they display high magnetization and adjustable anisotropy according to their size, shape and composition. The use of organometallic precursors makes it possible to adjust the size, shape (sphere, cube, rod, wire, urchin, …) and composition (alloys, core-shell, composition gradient, dumbbell, …) of the resulting NPs and hence their magnetic properties.

A setup to measure the temperature-dependent heating power of magnetically heated nanoparticles up to high temperature.

Magnetic heating, namely, the use of heat released by magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) excited with a high-frequency magnetic field, has so far been mainly used for biological applications. More recently, it has been shown that this heat can be used to catalyze chemical reactions, some of them occurring at temperatures up to 700 °C. The full exploitation of MNP heating properties requires the knowledge of the temperature dependence of their heating power up to high temperatures.