In a second breakthrough, the team revealed that hydrogen follows quantum-mechanical laws rather than classical ones as it detaches from the bond. If hydrogen were behaving as a classical particle, we could define a simple criterion for bond breaking, based on the distance between the silicon and hydrogen atoms. But hydrogen is not a classical particle; it behaves more like a cloud or a \u201cwave packet.\u201d Bond breaking is then defined by the probability that the hydrogen wave packet extends beyond a certain distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The newly discovered mechanism explains multiple experimental observations that have puzzled scientists for years. For instance, it was not understood why bond breaking is most detrimental when the electron energy is around seven electron-volts; the new results show that this value corresponds to the energy of the previously unidentified electronic state. Experimentalists had also observed that the process is temperature independent and is significantly slower (by a factor of one hundred) when using deuterium as a substitute for hydrogen \u2014 deuterium being an isotope that is electronically identical to hydrogen but twice as heavy. The new quantum model explains all of these effects, confirming that the underlying physics have finally been elucidated.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur results show that the interplay between electrons and nuclei in a highly non-classical regime is what drives bond breaking,\u201d said Woncheol Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in the Van de Walle lab and the study\u2019s first author. \u201cThis process doesn\u2019t fit into the usual picture of heating-induced damage; it\u2019s a short-lived quantum event that we can now model without needing to fit it to an experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a second breakthrough, the team revealed that hydrogen follows quantum-mechanical laws rather than classical ones as it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[85,46,141],"class_list":{"0":"post-390617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}