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Gerhard Ertl (; born 10 October 1936) is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
His work has paved the way for development of cleaner energy sources and will guide the development of fuel cells, said Astrid Graslund, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The Nobel academy said Ertl provided a detailed description of how chemical reactions take place on surfaces. His findings applied in both academic studies and industrial development, the academy said. “Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere,” the award citation reads.
In 2015, Ertl signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the COP21 climate summit in Paris.
He became the director at the Fritz Haber Institute of the MPG from 1986 till his retirement in 2004. In 1986, as honors, he was named "Honorary Professor" at the Free University of Berlin and at the Technische Universität Berlin, and in 1996 at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
From 2008 to 2016, Ertl served as a member of the university council of Technische Universität Darmstadt.
He always used new observation techniques like low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) at the beginning of his career, later ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS) and scanning tunneling microscope (STM) yielding ground breaking results. He won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998 along with Gabor A. Somorjai of the University of California, Berkeley for "their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surface in particular."
Gerhard Ertl was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The award, worth Swedish Krona 10 million (US$1.7 million, Pound sterling1.15 million), was announced on Ertl's 71st birthday. "I am speechless", Ertl told Associated Press from his office in Berlin. "I was not counting on this."
, Ertl has an h-index of 124 according to Scopus.
Ertl is one of the editors of the Handbook of Heterogeneous Catalysis. ()
Ertl is the co-editor of Engineering Of Chemical Complexity. 2013, World Scientific Publishing. ()
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