Chemists manipulated atomic bonds in a single molecule for the first time, changing it between 3 different forms: bent alkyne (left), diradical (center) and cyclobutadiene molecules (right). 📷 Leo Gross/IBM
When you're dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more precise.Chemical engineering has taken a step forward, with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the University of Regensburg in Germany, and IBM Research Europe forcing a single molecule to undergo a series of transformations with a tiny nudge of voltage.
"By these means, however, the reaction conditions are altered to such a degree that the basic mechanisms governing selectivity often remain elusive,"In other words, the complexity of forces at work pushing and pulling across a large organic molecule can make it hard to get a precise measure on what's occurring at each and every bond.
Sticking a thin layer of the material to a cold, salt-crusted piece of copper, the researchers drove the chlorine-bees away, leaving a handful of excitable carbon atoms holding onto unpaired electrons in a range of related structures.Two of those electrons in some of the structures happily reconnected with each other, reconfiguring the molecule's general honeycomb shape.
Shaken a little less vigorously, those electrons paired up differently, distorting the structure in a completely different fashion into what's known as a cyclobutadiene ring.
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