A cell for the controllable thermal treatment and electrochemical characterisation of single crystal alloy electrodes

A new electrochemical cell is described which provides the opportunity to perform electrochemical experiments and apply a controllable thermal treatment without exposing the sample to the laboratory atmosphere. We report typical model experiments with Pt(111) single crystal electrodes which can be performed in this cell. These include preparation and basic voltammetric characterisation of Cu/Pt(111) near-surface and surface alloys where monolayer amounts of Cu are located in the 1st and 2nd layers, respectively. The cell can also be useful for “electrochemical atomic layer epitaxy” to assemble multilayers using repetitive underpotential deposition.