Dr. Zhenrong Zhang Joins PNNL's IIC
Dr. Zhenrong Zhang got her B.S. and master degree from Lanzhou University, China and Ph.D. in Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science. She stayed in Austria for about two years before came to University of Texas at Austin. At University of Innsbruck, Austria, Zhenrong Zhang investigated the appearance and the mechanism of charge density wave (CDW) in the Br/Pt(110) system by angle resolved UV photoemission spectroscopy (ARUPS), temperature programmed desorption (TPD), variable temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). She also investigated the hydrogen-modified Pt(110) as a template for the growth of one-dimensional adsorbate structures with quantitative low-energy electron diffraction (LEED).
As a part of collaboration between PNNL and UT, her research in PNNL is focused on adsorption and dissociation of alcohols and water on TiO2 surface using STM. With the state-of the-art facilities in PNNL, she directly observed for the first time that methanol dissociates on oxygen vacancies via O-H bond scission rather than C-O scission. She also found that water molecule dissociate to form two OH groups and the hydroxyl pairs diffuses along Ti4+ row at lower coverage. These observations are prototype to understand the catalytic behavior of transitional mental oxides at molecular and atomic level. The adsorption of longer carbon chain alcohols are under investigation.