{"id":99121,"date":"2019-11-28T19:42:33","date_gmt":"2019-11-29T03:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/with-ultracold-chemistry-researchers-get-a-first-look-at-exactly-what-happens-during-a-chemical-reaction"},"modified":"2019-12-09T01:41:36","modified_gmt":"2019-12-09T09:41:36","slug":"with-ultracold-chemistry-researchers-get-a-first-look-at-exactly-what-happens-during-a-chemical-reaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/with-ultracold-chemistry-researchers-get-a-first-look-at-exactly-what-happens-during-a-chemical-reaction","title":{"rendered":"With ultracold chemistry, researchers get a first look at exactly what happens during a chemical reaction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/with-ultracold-chemistry-researchers-get-a-first-look-at-exactly-what-happens-during-a-chemical-reaction3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The coldest chemical reaction in the known universe took place in what appears to be a chaotic mess of lasers. The appearance deceives: Deep within that painstakingly organized chaos, in temperatures millions of times colder than interstellar space, Kang-Kuen Ni achieved a feat of precision. Forcing two ultracold molecules to meet and react, she broke and formed the coldest bonds in the history of molecular couplings.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cProbably in the next couple of years, we are the only lab that can do this,\u201d said Ming-Guang Hu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Ni lab and first author on their paper published today in <i>Science<\/i>. Five years ago, Ni, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a pioneer of ultracold chemistry, set out to build a new apparatus that could achieve the lowest temperature <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/chemical+reactions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">chemical reactions<\/a> of any currently available technology. But they couldn\u2019t be sure their intricate engineering would work.<\/p>\n<p>Now, they not only performed the coldest reaction yet, they discovered their new apparatus can do something even they did not predict. In such intense cold\u2014500 nanokelvin or just a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero\u2014their <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/molecules\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">molecules<\/a> slowed to such glacial speeds, Ni and her team could see something no one has been able to see before: the moment when two molecules meet to form two new molecules. In essence, they captured a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/chemical\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">chemical<\/a> reaction in its most critical and elusive act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The coldest chemical reaction in the known universe took place in what appears to be a chaotic mess of lasers. The appearance deceives: Deep within that painstakingly organized chaos, in temperatures millions of times colder than interstellar space, Kang-Kuen Ni achieved a feat of precision. Forcing two ultracold molecules to meet and react, she broke [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":368,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-chemistry","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99121","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\/368"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99496,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99121\/revisions\/99496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}