{"id":110263,"date":"2020-07-20T21:55:23","date_gmt":"2020-07-21T04:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/physicists-take-stop-action-images-of-light-driven-molecular-reaction"},"modified":"2020-07-20T21:55:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T04:55:23","slug":"physicists-take-stop-action-images-of-light-driven-molecular-reaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/physicists-take-stop-action-images-of-light-driven-molecular-reaction","title":{"rendered":"Physicists take stop-action images of light-driven molecular reaction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-take-stop-action-images-of-light-driven-molecular-reaction.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kansas State University physicists have taken extremely fast snapshots of light-induced molecular ring-opening reactions\u2014similar to those that help a human body produce vitamin D from sunlight. The research is published in Nature Chemistry.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThink of this as stop-motion like a cartoon,\u201d said Daniel Rolles, associate professor of physics and the study\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cFor each molecule, you start the reaction with a laser pulse, take snapshots of what it looks like as time passes and then put them together. This creates a \u2018molecular movie\u2019 that shows how the electronic structure of the molecule changes as a function of how much time passes between when we start and when we stop.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Shashank Pathak, doctoral student and lead author on the paper, said the idea was to study the dynamics of how a ring opens in a molecule on the time scale of femtosecond, which is one quadrillionth of a second. The researchers use a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/free-electron+laser\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">free-electron laser<\/a> to visualize how these reactions happen by recording electron energy spectra as the atoms in the molecule move apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kansas State University physicists have taken extremely fast snapshots of light-induced molecular ring-opening reactions\u2014similar to those that help a human body produce vitamin D from sunlight. The research is published in Nature Chemistry. \u201cThink of this as stop-motion like a cartoon,\u201d said Daniel Rolles, associate professor of physics and the study\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cFor each [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}