Single Atom Catalysts: A Review of Characterization Methods

Single atom catalysts (SACs) harbor a potential to exceed nanoparticle catalysts in terms of activity, stability and selectivity in a growing number of chemical reactions. Although their investigation is attracting significant attention, important fundamental questions focusing on key physicochemical properties of SACs (e. g., structure – property relationships, structural dynamics, reaction-driven restructuring) remain unanswered. A main challenge for research in the field is how to reliably characterize the environments of single atoms in the presence of complicating factors such as low weight loadings, strong metal-support interactions, and atomic and multiscale heterogeneity of bonding in the single atom sites. This review addresses this challenge – identifying catalytically relevant features of physicochemical properties of single atoms (charge state, electronic structure, atomic configuration, bonding interactions with a support) and surveying advanced tools/methods for characterizing them. The review places a strong emphasis on multimodal methods exploiting X-ray absorption, emission and photoelectron spectroscopies, and provides several examples from the authors’ research that demonstrate their use as powerful tools for SAC characterization.