Posted 08.04.2010 at 5:24 pm
9 Comments
Watching Electrons Move
In krypton’s single ionization state, quantum oscillations in the valence shell cycled in a little over six femtoseconds. Attosecond laser pulses probed the details and sensed the changing degrees of coherence between the two quantum states.
Berkeley Lab
For the first time, scientists have been able to watch electrons move in an atom's outer shell, in a breakthrough with major implications for our understanding of chemical processes.
Using ultra-short flashes of laser light, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., were able to time oscillations between valence electrons' quantum states.
Chemical reactions happen because of the dynamics of valence electrons, the ones in the outermost orbit of an atom. If you can watch them move, you can understand their mechanics and learn how they combine with other atoms to make up everything around us. But electrons move pretty fast, so this has been impossible until now.
Related Articles
Tags
Science, Rebecca Boyle, chemistry, electrons, lawrence berkeley national laboratory, physics, quantum mechanics, quantum uncertaintyBerkeley Lab's news site provides some in-depth descriptions, but basically what happened is that scientists measured the continued flopping of electrons between two quantum states. These valence shell oscillations cycled in a little over six femtoseconds. Using much faster attosecond laser pulses, the team was able to essentially capture this oscillation in action. The work is reported in this week's edition of the journal Nature.
The Berkeley Lab test simply proves that scientists can see these electrons move. But the finding can be applied to any problem in the physics and chemistry of liquids, solids, biological systems -- basically everything, according to Stephen Leone of Berkeley Lab's Chemical Sciences Division.
"(It will) allow us to unravel processes within and among atoms, molecules, and crystals on the electronic timescale," he says.
As Berkeley Lab's news writer notes, this would have been previously impossible with the "comparatively languorous femtosecond timescale."
9 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Popular Tags
Science
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2013: American Energy Independence
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Science
- Scientists Create First Cloned Human Embryo
- State Drops Charges Against High School Student Arrested For Science Experiment
- Space Tourism's Black Carbon Problem
- Cold Fusion Machine Gets Third-Party Verification, Inventor Says
- Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist
- What Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals' Extinction
- FYI: Do Wind Farms Make It Less Windy?
- How Do You Make A Painkiller Addiction-Proof?
- Untouched For The Last Billion Years, Water In Canadian Mine Holds Ingredients For Life
- FYI: Could Climate Change Cause More (And Bigger) Tornadoes?
Most Emailed
Science
- Portland, Oregon, Says No To Fluoridation
- Got A Wound? Science Says Rub Some Dirt In It
- Was The Oklahoma City Tornado The Worst In History?
- These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny
- The Moore, Oklahoma Tornado, From Space
- The Oklahoma Tornado, From Space
- Synthetic Biologists Engineer A Custom Flu Vaccine In A Week
- These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny
- FEMA's 'Waffle House Index' Rates Moore, Oklahoma, At Disaster Level Yellow
- FYI: Could Climate Change Cause More (And Bigger) Tornadoes?
Most Viewed
Science
- Portland, Oregon, Says No To Fluoridation
- Got A Wound? Science Says Rub Some Dirt In It
- Was The Oklahoma City Tornado The Worst In History?
- These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny
- The Moore, Oklahoma Tornado, From Space
- The Oklahoma Tornado, From Space
- Synthetic Biologists Engineer A Custom Flu Vaccine In A Week
- These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny
- FEMA's 'Waffle House Index' Rates Moore, Oklahoma, At Disaster Level Yellow
- FYI: Could Climate Change Cause More (And Bigger) Tornadoes?
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Rebecca Boyle | Email
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
First. UC Berkeley FTW!
This is pretty exciting and I imagine that this is going to revolutionize the field of quantum mechanics in some way or another.
That laser might have killed Schrödinger's cat.
A strobe light can freeze a fan blade to show where something was and allow a prediction of it's future state/position in time & space. This laser is a super-strobe at the atomic level and may bring about the demise of the uncertainty principle.
someone get out the pen and start re-writing those textbooks
Oh Hiesenberg
So what does this mean for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle still remains intact because we cannot be sure that by mesuaring the outcome we may have in some way changed it. For instance if some energy was to be transferred from the photon to the electron the electrons future path could change.
Not to mention that a Femtosecond is 1000x an attosecond so they are seeing it at basically .0167% validity, which is really low to reiterate it in words. This is not seeing it move, nor is it breaking any quantum I feel like. This is like putting less than one point on a graph and trying to draw am intricate line. Honestly, there are some much better articles on here right now.
an intricate line* (:
I agree - it will not change anything about the uncertainty principle. In quantum physics, particles move in "wave packets" and if you calculate and define the position, it will still have an indefinite wavelength (meaning indefinite momentum). You can see this by looking at the "wavefunction collapse" equations.
I would like to see their data (more importantly their margin of error values) as well - I'll have to try to find it in Nature.
As far as measuring and "seeing" the e- go between its quantum states, this is great. It can also bring us closer to knowing the "in-between" stuff as well. This would be interesting if it could be applied to the current research on 'supersolids".