{"id":219627,"date":"2025-08-08T04:16:05","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T09:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/individual-atoms-tracked-during-real-time-chemical-bond-formation"},"modified":"2025-08-08T04:16:05","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T09:16:05","slug":"individual-atoms-tracked-during-real-time-chemical-bond-formation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/individual-atoms-tracked-during-real-time-chemical-bond-formation","title":{"rendered":"Individual atoms tracked during real-time chemical bond formation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/individual-atoms-tracked-during-real-time-chemical-bond-formation.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at European XFEL in Germany have tracked in real time the movement of individual atoms during a chemical reaction in the gas phase. Using extremely short X-ray flashes, they were able to observe the formation of an iodine molecule (I\u2082) after irradiating diiodomethane (CH\u2082I\u2082) molecules by infrared light, which involves breaking two bonds and forming a new one.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, they were able to distinguish this reaction from two other reaction pathways, namely the separation of a single iodine atom from the diiodomethane, or the excitation of bending vibrations in the bound molecule. The results, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-62274-z\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, provide new insights into fundamental reaction mechanisms that have so far been very difficult to distinguish experimentally.<\/p>\n<p>So-called elimination reactions in which <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/small+molecules\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">small molecules<\/a> are formed from a larger molecule are central to many chemical processes\u2014from atmospheric chemistry to catalyst research. However, the detailed mechanism of many reactions, in which several atoms break and re-form their bonds, often remains obscure. The reason: The processes take place in incredibly short times\u2014in femtoseconds, or a few millionths of a billionth of a second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at European XFEL in Germany have tracked in real time the movement of individual atoms during a chemical reaction in the gas phase. Using extremely short X-ray flashes, they were able to observe the formation of an iodine molecule (I\u2082) after irradiating diiodomethane (CH\u2082I\u2082) molecules by infrared light, which involves breaking two bonds and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219627","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}