Photo credit: Wolfram Däumel — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 DE
Gerhard Ertl
born 1936 · Germany · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 2007
German physical chemist who founded modern surface science, resolving step by step how molecules adsorb, move and react on solid surfaces.
Nobel Prize work
Prized for studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Combining LEED, photoelectron spectroscopy and molecular beams under ultrahigh vacuum, he explained ammonia synthesis on iron and CO oxidation on platinum at the atomic level — making heterogeneous catalysis a quantitative science.