The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2007 goes to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Congratulations Professor!
We have the semiconductor industry of the 1960s to thank for the emergence of surface chemistry. Gerhard Ertl was one of the first to see the potential of the new techniques and has pioneered methodology for different experimental procedures that give us a clear picture of surface reactions.
I wrote about Ertl’s work on several occasions for ChemWeb.com in its previous incarnation and reported on a catalyst surface science meeting of the UK’s Royal Society in 2004. There is a list of past winners on Sciencebase together with links and a brief summary of their research here.