In the quantum world, molecules are always on the move. And for the first time ever, scientists have directly captured these tiny quantum dances in action\u2014and they did so by blowing them up real good.<\/p>\n
Even at absolute zero, individual particles constantly vibrate without a fixed position, a phenomenon referred to as zero-point motion. In a paper published August 7 in Science<\/a>, researchers at European XFEL harnessed this behavior for the 2-iodopyridine molecule, which consists of 11 atoms. By blasting the molecule with powerful, short bursts of X-ray pulses, the team created a \u201cmicroscopic big bang\u201d that allowed them to track, reconstruct, and therefore visualize the molecule\u2019s quantum fluctuations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were able to see that the atoms don\u2019t just vibrate individually, but that they vibrate in a coupled manner, following fixed patterns,\u201d study senior author Till Jahnke said in a statement<\/a>. Jahnke, a physicist at the Institute for Nuclear Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, added that iodopyridine \u201cfeatures a whole repertoire of 27 different vibrational modes,\u201d a fascinating quantum behavior that cannot be explained classically.<\/p>\n The team used a technique called Coulomb Explosion Imaging, which zaps molecules with X-rays to knock out swathes of electrons from the target molecule. This makes the molecule positively charged overall, causing the atom parts to repel each other and eventually fly apart. A special instrument quickly recorded the shape and motion of each fragment from the explosion, which lasted less than a femtosecond (a quadrillionth of a second).<\/p>\n Based on the records, the researchers modeled the explosion to \u201cvisualize\u201d the motion of the molecule, confirming that it aligned with the correlated zero-point motion they were hoping to observe.<\/p>\n Other than bringing us a tangible representation of the quantum world, the new results represent the \u201cfingerprints\u201d of the atoms\u2019 quantum behavior. Using this technique to study similar phenomena for other molecules could open entirely new avenues for physicists to investigate individual molecules with unprecedented precision, the researchers state.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the future, this technique could be used to study even larger molecules, and time-resolved movies of their internal motions are now possible,\u201d said Michael Meyer, study co-author and a scientist at the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging in Germany, in an XFEL statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is to go beyond the dance of atoms and observe in addition the dance of electrons\u2014a choreography that is significantly faster and also influenced by atomic motion,\u201d said Jahnke. \u201cWith our apparatus, we can gradually create real short films of molecular processes\u2014something that was once unimaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the quantum world, molecules are always on the move. And for the first time ever, scientists have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[29498,111,139,69,393,3303,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-30633","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-molecules","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-physics","13":"tag-quantum-physics","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}