Preface

The need to develop cleaner/greener methods of both energy production and chemical synthesis has been driving renewed interest in electrocatalysis. Experimental advances in the application of spectroscopic methods, such as IR, INS, NMR, and XAS, and structural probes such as STM, AFM, high resolution TEM, and XRD are providing a wealth of data that enable structure/property relationships in electrocatalysis to be investigated. Similarly, developments in theoretical methods (MD simulations, DFT calculations, and Monte Carlo simulations combined with ab initio methodologies) are providing new insights regarding old catalysts and promise to provide direction in the search for new catalysts. The advent of high throughput catalyst preparation methods means that many more electrocatalyst formulations are being screened for an ever-wider variety of reactions. Directing this effort will require the combined efforts of theoretical models and the development of new experimental techniques. Such was the motivation behind the proposal for Faraday Discussion 140, which was originally proposed by David Schiffrin of the University of Liverpool whilst attending a workshop on Computational Electrochemistry in Santorini, Greece in September 2004. It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that I had been selected to put the proposal together and to chair the meeting, given that I wasn't attending the workshop. However, David can be very persuasive and it has been my privilege to organise the Discussion described in this text.

The organisation began properly at a second workshop meeting hosted by Marc Koper of Leiden University in Leiden, the Lorentz Workshop on Fuel Cell Electrocatalysis, in Oct 2006. There Elisabet Ahlberg (University of Göteborg), Carol Korzeniewski (Texas Tech Univeristy), and Elena Savinova (then dividing her time between the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis, Novosibirsk and the University of Strasbourg) and I met over dinner with Marc to draw up a plan of whom we'd like to have as invited speakers and to discuss the various themes we would want to feature in the meeting. Of particular importance to us were papers from theoreticians that would reach out to experimentalists, experimental/spectroscopy papers that were pushing the boundaries of the techniques to provide new information, discussion of the state-of-the-art catalysts for both the hydrogen and oxygen reactions, and a desire to see that electrocatalysis is more than just fuel cells. To our delight all of the speakers we approached on our most wanted list accepted the invitation and, more importantly for a Faraday Discussion, they all produced their manuscripts for discussion at the meeting and inclusion in the volume. Together with the contributed papers, where there were four times as many abstracts submitted than we could accept as full papers in the meeting, I believe that the meeting lived up to our aims.

To address the problem of demand for a contributed paper at the meeting, I organised a special issue of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, which the editorial and production teams of the RSC managed to deliver on time to be handed out to each participant at the meeting. This special issue, also entitled “Electrocatalysis: Theory and Experiment at the Interface” is available as volume 10, issue 25, of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics. It contains 22 further papers that I wholeheartedly recommend to readers of this Discussion.

The meeting itself was comprised of four sessions, intended to represent those aims that Elisabeth, Carol, Elena and I discussed over dinner almost two years previously. Marc Koper gave an excellent opening lecture, setting this Discussion in the context of previous Faraday Discussions on electrochemistry related topics and then going on to highlight the power of combining theoretical and experimental methods in exploring the structure and properties of electrocatalysts. His talk enthused and energised the delegates, who went on to vigorously discuss the other papers presented for the meeting. The concluding remarks were expertly presented by David Schiffrin, who did an excellent job of both summarising the meeting and pointing out where we should be thinking of going next.

The meeting also included a packed poster session with 37 posters, which were also enthusiastically discussed. I do not believe that any student or postdoc attending the meeting ever felt that their poster was ignored and many were able to present and discuss their work at the highest level. The Organising Committee awarded the Skinner prize (for best student poster) to M. J. T. C. van der Niet (Leiden University) for her work on “Interactions between H₂O and preadsorbed H or O on Pt(533)”.

On behalf of the Organising Committee, I would like to thank all those who participated in Faraday Discussion 140. I am sure that those unable to attend who will read this volume will absorb some of the excitement that was generated at the meeting, and I hope that many of the points continue to be vigorously discussed when we meet again or in the literature. We would also like to thank the RSC staff who made the organisation so much easier than I (Andrea) anticipated. In particular, we would like to thank Morwenna Gilbert and Nicola Nugent for all of their hard work and emails. We would like to thank all of those whose papers appear in this volume, for meeting the deadlines (well, almost) and keeping to the 5 minutes allowed for presentation. Finally we thank Piotr Kleszyk, Gaël Chouchelamane, Jon Speed and Rob Johnson, from my group, for their excellent skills in keeping delegates to time, managing the University's data projector systems, and otherwise keeping me calm. Finally, we acknowledge the International Society of Electrochemistry and the Electrochemical Society for their co-sponsorship of the meeting, and the University of Southampton and the Army Research Office for their generous financial support of the meeting.

Andrea E. Russell (Chair, Editor)

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