Research Interests
Barbara Lechner’s research focusses on the investigation of the dynamic restructuring of functional nanomaterials under realistic conditions, e.g. model catalysts under a reactive gas atmosphere. To this purpose, they place a scanning tunneling microscope with high temporal and spatial resolution directly into gas mixtures and thus investigate how the structure of particles (metal clusters) and oxide supports changes under these conditions. By using small clusters with a precisely defined number of atoms, it is possible to investigate how the formation and decay of highly reactive particle structures occurs, can be controlled and how such structural changes influence the function of a material.