Ultrashort laser pulses catch a snapshot of a 'molecular handshake'

 


Liquids and solutions are complex environments—think, for example, of sugar dissolving in water, where each sugar molecule becomes surrounded by a restless crowd of water molecules. Inside living cells, the picture is even more complex: tiny liquid droplets carry proteins or RNA and help organize the cell's chemistry.

Despite their importance, liquid environments are notoriously difficult to study at the level of individual molecules and electrons. The core challenge is that liquids lack a fixed structure, and the ultrafast interactions between solute and solvent—where chemistry actually happens—have remained largely invisible to scientists.

High-harmonic spectroscopy reveals new details

A team of researchers from Ohio State University and Louisiana State University has now shown that high-harmonic spectroscopy (HHS)—a nonlinear optical technique capable of capturing electron dynamics on attosecond timescales—can reveal the tiny, local structures that form when one liquid dissolves into another. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marks an important step toward directly probing solute–solvent interactions in the liquid phase.

HHS works by using ultrafast laser bursts to briefly pull electrons away from their molecules and then measure the light they emit when they snap back. This creates snapshots of how electrons and even atomic nuclei move, on timescales so short that ordinary techniques can't capture them.

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