Chemistry is all about how electrons move around. Every reaction shifts fuzzy, quantum clouds of electrons from one place to another. So a technique unveiled today, which takes pictures of these clouds, could revolutionize our understanding of the molecules that surround us.
..."The ability to observe a molecular orbital really caught a lot of people by surprise," says David Villeneuve, a physicist from the National Research Council of Canada's Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Ottawa. Villeneuve was part of the Canadian and Japanese collaboration that invented the method, described in this week's Nature1. "An approximate take on quantum mechanics tells you that you can't directly observe an orbital, yet we have," he says.
The imaging technique uses extremely short laser pulses to briefly ionize an electron away from a molecule of nitrogen, which is simply two nitrogen atoms stuck together. As they spring back, the electrons emit light that can interfere with the laser pulse in different ways depending on the electron's position and where the laser pulse hit the molecule.
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