Chemical bond formation observed by laser technique

This fundamental advance, reported in Science Express and long thought impossible, is expected to have a significant impact on the understanding of how chemical reactions take place and on efforts to design reactions that generate energy, create new products and fertilise crops more efficiently.

‘This is the very core of all chemistry…because it controls chemical reactivity,’ said Anders Nilsson, a professor at the SLAC/Stanford SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis and at Stockholm University who led the research. ‘But because so few molecules inhabit this transition state at any given moment, no one thought we’d ever be able to see it.’

The experiments took place at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility in Menlo Park, California. Its brilliant, strobe-like X-ray laser pulses are reportedly short enough to illuminate atoms and molecules, and fast enough to watch chemical reactions unfold in a way never possible before.