“…Usually, kinetic transitions in CO oxidation were experimentally studied under high-vacuum conditions by varying the CO/O 2 pressure ratio at constant temperature. [9,10,12] Such an experiment is illustrated for Pd foil in the right inset of Figure 2 a, at constant p O 2 ¼1.3 10 À5 mbar and T = 449 K. Similar to the case of Pt foil, [12,14,15] the global CO 2 formation rate exhibits a pronounced hysteresis upon cyclic variation of the CO partial pressure manifest by the gap between the kinetic transition t A from the high-reactivity to the lowreactivity state and the reverse transition t B . In between, the system is bistable, that is, it can be either in the high-or in the low-reactivity steady state, depending on the prehistory.…”