MIT News   September 13, 2023 Reaction rates at spatially heterogeneous, unstable interfaces are difficult to quantify, yet they are essential in engineering many chemical systems, such as batteries and electrocatalysts. Experimental characterizations of such materials by operando microscopy produce rich image datasets, but data-driven methods to learn physics from these images are lacking because of the complex coupling of reaction kinetics, surface chemistry and phase separation. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Stanford University, industry, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) showed that heterogeneous reaction kinetics can be learned from in situ scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) images of carbon-coated […]