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.
Keywords: catalysis; click chemistry; single-molecule fluorescence microscopy; super-resolution localization mapping.