For the first time a gas has been trapped in only one dimension: these are krypton atoms that have been inserted into a tube just wider than the diameter of the atoms and forced to remain close to each other.
The European research group led by the British University of Nottingham obtained the result and the work is published in the journal Acs Nano.
The researchers used an innovative transmission electron microscope that will allow us to better understand how chemical reactions take place. The atoms that make up a gas have characteristics such that observing them is an almost impossible challenge, because in addition to being extremely small, between 0.1 and 0.4 millionths of a millimeter, the atoms of a gas are also incredibly fast, moving vibrating at speeds close to 400 meters per second.
To be able to photograph its behavior, British researchers designed a special trap, namely thin nanotubes with a diameter slightly larger than the size of the same krypton atoms they wanted to study.
The gas atoms were captured individually inside small spheres, composed of a few dozen carbon atoms, and these spheres subsequently brought inside the nanotubes.
Once in the thin tubes, the carbon spheres were 'burned' using laser pulses leaving the krypton atoms in their trap.
Forced to remain aligned inside the nanotubes, the atoms developed chemical bonds with their neighbors, exactly as they would have done in a free environment, but remaining confined in a very small space, so small as to allow for the first time photograph previously unpublished details on chemical interactions under the microscope, for example on the so-called van der Waals bond.
“It's an exciting innovation because it allows us to see the van der Waals interaction between two atoms in real space,” said Ute Kaiser, of the University of Ulm in Germany.
“This – she added – is a significant development in the field of chemistry and physics that can help us better understand the functioning of atoms and molecules”.
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