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Benchmarking is a community-based and (preferably) community-driven activity involving consensus-based decisions on how to make reproducible, fair, and relevant assessments. In catalysis science, important catalyst performance metrics include activity, selectivity, and the deactivation profile, which enable comparisons between new and standard catalysts. Benchmarking also requires careful documentation, archiving, and sharing of methods and measurements, to ensure that the full value of research data can be realized. Beyond these goals, benchmarking presents unique opportunities to advance and accelerate understanding of complex reaction systems by combining and comparing experimental information from multiple, in situ and operando techniques with theoretical insights derived from calculations characterizing model systems. This Perspective describes the origins and uses of benchmarking and its applications in computational catalysis, heterogeneous catalysis, molecular catalysis, and electrocatalysis. It also discusses opportunities and challenges for future developments in these fields.

Catalysts are widely used to increase reaction rates. They function by stabilizing the transition state of the reaction at their active site, where the atomic arrangement ensures favourable interactions.sup.1. However, mechanistic understanding is often limited when catalysts possess multiple active sites--such as sites associated with either the step edges or the close-packed terraces of inorganic nanoparticles.sup.2-4--with distinct activities that cannot be measured simultaneously. An example is the oxidation of carbon monoxide over platinum surfaces, one of the oldest and best studied heterogeneous reactions. In 1824, this reaction was recognized to be crucial for the function of the Davy safety lamp, and today it is used to optimize combustion, hydrogen production and fuel-cell operation.sup.5,6. The carbon dioxide products are formed in a bimodal kinetic energy distribution.sup.7-13; however, despite extensive study.sup.5, it remains unclear whether this reflects the involvement of more than one reaction mechanism occurring at multiple active sites.sup.12,13. Here we show that the reaction rates at different active sites can be measured simultaneously, using molecular beams to controllably introduce reactants and slice ion imaging.sup.14,15 to map the velocity vectors of the product molecules, which reflect the symmetry and the orientation of the active site.sup.16. We use this velocity-resolved kinetics approach to map the oxidation rates of carbon monoxide at step edges and terrace sites on platinum surfaces, and find that the reaction proceeds through two distinct channels.sup.11-13: it is dominated at low temperatures by the more active step sites, and at high temperatures by the more abundant terrace sites. We expect our approach to be applicable to a wide range of heterogeneous reactions and to provide improved mechanistic understanding of the contribution of different active sites, which should be useful in the design of improved catalysts.The catalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide over platinum proceeds through two distinct channels: it is dominated at low temperatures by the more active step sites and at high temperatures by the more abundant terrace sites of the platinum surface., Author(s): Jannis Neugebohren [sup.1] , Dmitriy Borodin [sup.1] , Hinrich W. Hahn [sup.1] , Jan Altschäffel [sup.1] [sup.2] , Alexander Kandratsenka [sup.2] , Daniel J. Auerbach [sup.2] , Charles T. [...]

Nanoparticles of late transition metals are used as catalysts and electrocatalysts for industrial chemical reactions that produce fuels, convert chemical energy to electricity, and clean up pollution associated with the generation and use of these fuels. Sitja I et al. i [4] made three exceptionally well-defined model catalysts consisting of a hexagonal array of Pd nanoparticles on an ultrathin alumina single crystalline film, where the Pd particles contain either 174, 360, or 768 atoms (within <8%) but have the same separations. [Extracted from the article]