{"id":216550,"date":"2025-06-25T02:05:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T07:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/high-explosives-in-slow-motion-freezing-molecules-in-place-shows-chemical-reactions"},"modified":"2025-06-25T02:05:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T07:05:12","slug":"high-explosives-in-slow-motion-freezing-molecules-in-place-shows-chemical-reactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/high-explosives-in-slow-motion-freezing-molecules-in-place-shows-chemical-reactions","title":{"rendered":"High explosives in slow motion: Freezing molecules in place shows chemical reactions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/high-explosives-in-slow-motion-freezing-molecules-in-place-shows-chemical-reactions.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Safe and effective high explosives are critical to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory\u2019s (LLNL) mission of stockpile stewardship. It is relatively simple to study the composition of such material before a detonation or examine the soot-like remnants afterward. But the chemistry in between, which dictates much of the detonation process, evades experimental interrogation as it passes by in a few nanoseconds or less.<\/p>\n<p>In a study <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2426320122\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>, researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and LLNL triggered a slow decomposition of a high explosive and measured the effects on the molecules within it. The work provides the proof of concept for a process that could be extended to examine ultra-fast dynamic chemistry during detonations and illuminates intermediate structures that have never been experimentally seen before.<\/p>\n<p>At the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, the team used X-rays to both trigger the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/chemical+reactions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">chemical reactions<\/a> involved in decomposition and measure the results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Safe and effective high explosives are critical to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory\u2019s (LLNL) mission of stockpile stewardship. It is relatively simple to study the composition of such material before a detonation or examine the soot-like remnants afterward. But the chemistry in between, which dictates much of the detonation process, evades experimental interrogation as it passes [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216550","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\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}