Reply to “Comment on ‘Using Photoelectron Spectroscopy and Quantum Mechanics to Determine d-Band Energies of Metals for Catalytic Applications’”

We wholeheartedly agree with the majority of statements made in the comment-that an understanding of the electronic structure of catalyst surfaces to understand their catalytic activity is one of the most important subjects within the field of catalysis research, that a simplified approach to correlating electronic structure and activity would be desirable, that our study testing, among other things, such a correlation is therefore of “significant importance”, that, however, such a simplified correlation is not at all straightforward, and hence an oversimplified “d-band center model” is not really adequate to describe the complicated processes involved in catalytic activity. The comment also gives a nice example of final state effects in photoemission spectra (a satellite structure 6 eV below the Fermi energy of Fe, Co, and Ni), which obscure an experimental determination of the ground state d-band center (as described in our paper). Finally, the comment gives a good summary of the bibliography of the comment’s authors in this research field.