Public Lecture | Catalytic Adventures in an X-ray Playground by Adam Hoffman

Catalysts are the unsung heroes of our modern age. Working tirelessly behind the scenes, they find many applications that touch our lives, from producing the fertilizers that sustain the global population, to breaking down toxic chemicals to reduce pollution. To design the next generation of catalysts, researchers must understand at the atomic level how a catalyst operates over time. This hard-fought knowledge takes more than individual engineers and chemists working in their own university laboratories to obtain. Seeing the catalyst function at this level of detail requires state-of-the-art X-ray techniques such as those found at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). Here at SSRL, we utilize a suite of tools that combine X-ray and catalysis science to follow the atomic level changes of a working catalyst over time. By developing these tools and providing them to scientists from across the United States, we enable a catalysis community, tackling grand challenges, and advancing the DOE mission. In this talk, I will introduce the basics of catalysis and one of the powerful methods provided by SSRL’s X-rays. I will then present, as an illustration, new insights that our community has discovered for the conversion of CO and CO2 into alternative fuels and other useful products.

About the Speaker:

A native east-coaster, Adam Hoffman has a passion for playing board games, gardening, and tinkering to answer the question, “how does it work, and can I take it apart?” This curiosity started out as a kid disassembling radios and followed him into his academic career. Adam received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Villanova University before moving west to complete his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis. Adam started his adventure at SLAC during graduate school when he used the X-ray beams of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to show how small changes in the organization of atoms in a catalyst can have a large impact in how it performs. This work gave fundamental insights into the catalyst's operation while also pushing the limits of X-ray measurement capabilities. After graduation, he joined SLAC as a postdoctoral fellow. He is now a staff scientist at SSRL, where he bridges the X-ray physics and catalysis science worlds, developing experimental and analytical methods and hosting experiments that make use of these capabilities. These new techniques enable the catalysis community to carry out some of the most complex catalysis experiments now performed, and now, thanks to Adam and others like him, SLAC is at the center of it all!