M. R. Decan and J. C. Scaiano, "Study of Single Catalytic Events at Copper-in-Charcoal: Localization of Click Activity Through Sub-Diffraction Observation of Single Catalytic Events", J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 6, 4049–4053 (2015).
Single molecule fluorescence microscopy reveals that copper-in-charcoal—a high performance click catalyst— has remarkably few catalytic sites, with 90% of the charcoal particles being inactive, and for the catalytic ones the active sites represent a minute fraction (∼0.003%) of the surface. The intermittent nature of the catalytic events enables subdiffraction resolution and mapping of the catalytic sites.