Spatiotemporal dynamics of fluctuations in a surface reaction by Karhunen–Loeve decomposition of field emission images

Local fluctuations in the catalytic oxidation reaction of CO are studied with field electron microscopy (FEM) in the vicinity of the (110) plane of a [100]-oriented platinum tip. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of the digitized FEM images is employed to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of fluctuations in the mono- and bistable ranges of the reaction. The results are shown to be in qualitative agreement with a correlation analysis of the local time series.