Surface Chemistry Pioneer Honored -- Nobelist's Influence Felt From Energy to Electronics

Oct 12, 08:39 AM

Current Headlines: By Malcolm Ritter

NEW YORK - A German scientist received a startling present Wednesday on his 71st birthday: a $1.5 million Nobel Prize to honor his groundbreaking studies of how chemical reactions take place on surfaces.

Gerhard Ertl laid the foundation for studies of modern surface chemistry, a field that will help scientists produce renewable energy more efficiently and create new materials for electronic devices, the Nobel committee said.

Surface chemistry is also important for many industrial processes, and key to understanding such diverse things as how pollution eats away at the ozone layer, fuel cells produce energy without pollution and catalytic converters clean up automobile exhaust.

Ertl showed how to get reliable results from technically demanding experiments and provided detailed descriptions of key chemical reactions, the Nobel committee said Wednesday.

"His insights have provided the scientific basis of modern surface chemistry," the committee said.

Ertl (pronounced EHR'-tul) is an emeritus professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. He started work in surface chemistry in the mid-1970s and has continued ever since.

The prize is "very, very well-deserved," said Jack Hudson, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His work showed scientists how to conduct and interpret studies that produce a detailed understanding of the complex chemistry involved, Hudson said.

By learning the details of surface reactions, scientists can develop better ways to make those reactions happen, said Bruce Bursten, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

"This is going to be increasingly important as we try to develop new sources of energy," such as with devices to capture solar energy, Bursten said.

Ertl said he was shocked by the news that he'd won the prize, but that it is "the best birthday present that you can give to somebody."

Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

On Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

Prizes for literature, peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

On the Web

nobelprize.org

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Surface Chemistry

Gerhard Ertl's clarification of the rules of surface chemistry has allowed scientists to develop better catalysts - materials, often metals, that help drive chemical reactions that would not otherwise occur.

For example, the surfaces inside catalytic converters grab molecules of carbon monoxide in auto exhaust and perform a shotgun marriage between them and oxygen atoms to create nontoxic carbon dioxide.

Similarly, molecules of atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen combine to make ammonia, the crucial ingredient in fertilizer, without which the world would be a hungrier place.

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Originally published by Malcolm Ritter Associated Press .

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