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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2017
In Pixar’s Inside Out, the character Joy proclaims, “Do you ever look at someone and wonder what’s going on inside?” Driven by similar curiosity, the scientific community has developed remarkable in situ characterization tools to visualize the inner workings of complex, dynamic systems, elucidating their functions and enabling next-generation technologies. This article describes our research developing plasmonic techniques to visualize dynamic chemical transformations in situ with nanometer-scale resolution. As a model system, we investigated the hydrogenation and dehydrogenation of palladium nanocrystals. Using environmental electron microscopy and spectroscopy, we monitored this reaction with sub-2-nm spatial resolution and millisecond time resolution. Particles of different sizes, shapes, and crystallinities exhibit distinct thermodynamic and kinetic properties, highlighting several important design principles for next-generation catalysts and energy-storage devices.