Dedication to Helmut Knözinger (1935–2014)

Excerpt

This volume is dedicated to Helmut Knözinger, a leading scientist in the field of characterisation of catalysts by surface spectroscopies and one of the coeditors of Advances in Catalysis for many years. I met him for the first time in the mid sixties, when we both were assistant professors in Munich, but at the two different universities. Helmut had performed his thesis work at the Ludwig Maximilians University and then studied the dehydration of alcohols on alumina, thereby continuing the tradition of his famous mentor, Georg-Maria Schwab by being concerned with the aspects of ‘real’ catalysis, while I was working at the Technical University on model systems using the tools of surface science. In 1973 I returned to Munich and became his colleague at the same institute for the next 13 years. Our first collaboration was addressing the question if polynuclear metal carbonyls can be considered as models for chemisorption of CO on metal surfaces, and later he was even the editor (together with his close friend and colleague B.C. Gates and L. Guczi) of a book on this topic entitled Metal clusters and catalysis. A frequently cited paper with the title Molecular organometallic chemistry on surfaces—reactivity of metal carbonyls on metal oxides belongs into the same category. …