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Abstract

Heterogeneous catalysis is one of the fields of modern technology, where the application of complex inorganic materials is of enormous economical importance. For a long time, the chemical and structural complexity of catalyst materials has precluded detailed insights into chemical processes on catalyst surfaces. In the last decades, however, substantial progress has been made toward a microscopic-level understanding of reaction mechanisms and kinetics, mainly based on the development of new well-defined model systems and on advances in experimental technology and theory. Scrutinizing the example of supported model catalysts, we review some of these innovations in model catalysis. As a particular challenging aspect of todays work, we discuss the question how detailed structural information on the model systems can be linked to catalytic reaction kinetics at the microscopic level. This revised version was published online in February 2005. In the previous version the issue was not marked as a special issue, and the issue title and the editor was missing.