In the quantum world, molecules always move. And for the first time, scientists directly captured these small quantitative dances in action – and they did so by blowing them.
Even at absolute zero, individual items are constantly vibrating without a fixed position, a phenomenon called zero-point displacement. In paper published on 7 August in ScienceResearchers at European XFEL have used this behavior for the 2-Idopiridine molecule, which consists of 11 atoms. Exploding the molecule with powerful, short outbursts of radiographic pulses, the team created a “microscopic large bang”, which allowed them to track, rebuild, and therefore visible the quantitative fluctuations of the molecule.
“We could see that the atoms not only vibrate individually, but that they vibrate in a coupled way, following fixed patterns,” study a senior author until Jahnke said in A Statement. Jahnke, a physicist at the Institute for Nuclear Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, added that an odopidine “presents a whole repertoire of 27 different vibrating regimes”, fascinating quantum behavior cannot be explained classically.
The team used a technique called Coulomb explosion imaging, which sneaks molecules with X-rays to hit swings of electrons from the target molecule. This makes the molecule positively charged altogether, causing the atomic parts to repel each other and eventually flying away. A special instrument quickly recorded the shape and movement of each fragment from the explosion, which lasted less than femtosequency (square of a second).
Based on the records, the researchers modeled the explosion to “depict” the molecule’s movement, confirming that it aligned with the correlated zero-point move they hoped to observe.
In addition to bringing us a tangible representation of the quantum world, the new results represent the “fingerprints” of the quantum behavior of the atoms. Using this technique to study similar phenomena for other molecules could open completely new avenues for physicists to explore individual molecules with unprecedented accuracy, the researchers state.
“In the future, this technique could be used to study even larger molecules, and movies of time resolved by their internal moves are now possible,” said Michael Meyer, a study and scientist at the Hamburg Center for Ultra-Speed Image in Germany, XFEL statement.
“Our goal is to pass the dance of atoms and also observe the dance of electrons – choreography significantly faster and also influenced by atomic motion,” said Jahnke. “With our device, we can gradually create real short movies of molecular processes – something that was once unimaginable.”
