Pirouetting Molecules Can Help Us Learn About the History of the Universe

 In their natural environment, molecules behave like the balls in a lottery machine. They spin, tumble and crash into each other many millions of times per second.

Just like an airstream agitates the balls in a lottery machine, ubiquitous thermal radiatio also gives molecules energy that keeps them bouncing around and spinning chaotically.

So, as you can imagine, it’s quite challenging to study squirmy molecules in their restless chaos!

Imagine how much more we can learn if we can keep an individual molecule in one place. We need to isolate it from the bustle of the crowd and hold onto it tightly to counteract the thermal radiation that attempts to rotate it. This is like overcoming the airstream agitation in the lottery machine by holding onto a single ball with a firm grip, so it becomes easy to read its number.

Manipulating a lottery machine will likely get you in trouble, but luckily, our team is only studying how to apply this conceptual idea to molecules in our lab at NIST.



Atom are the smallest unit of matter, and molecules are a group of these atoms bonded together.

When we remove an electron from an atom or a molecule, it becomes positively charged. Once positively charged, it is what scientists call an atomic ion or a molecular ion. We can confine ions inside a vacuum chamber in a cage made of electromagnetic fields, known as an iontra. The vacuum inside our apparatus guarantees that few other particles collide with the trapped ions.

You Spin Me Right ’Round

The molecule can also spin in place, and that rotational motion is not picked up by the atomic ion. Thermal radiation can drive the molecular rotation and heat it up. This is similar to how your skin heats up when absorbing infrared radiation from the sun.

You may think that the molecule can rotate at any rate, but that is not true. Quantum mechanics dictates that the molecule's rotational energy changes in discrete steps.

So, when the molecule heats, it climbs the rungs of a ladder of energies. We call each rung of this ladder a quantum state. Due to the random nature of the thermal radiation, this is not a directed climb. Instead, the molecule is driven randomly through hundreds of different rotational states.

I’ll Be Watching You

To pick up information on the molecule’s rotational state, our team had to come up with a few more tricks that used the same co-trapped atomic ion that already did the cooling. It can pick up the molecule’s back-and-forth motion but not rotation.

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