Researchers
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory got a neat surprise when
they were trying to develop a new method of making
graphene. They managed to capture a chemical reaction in the act, atom by atom, bond by bond:
“We
weren’t thinking about making beautiful images; the reactions
themselves were the goal,” says Fischer, a staff scientist in Berkeley
Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and a professor of chemistry at
the University of California, Berkeley. “But to really see what was
happening at the single-atom level we had to use a uniquely sensitive
atomic force microscope in Michael Crommie’s laboratory.” Crommie is an
MSD scientist and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.
What the
microscope showed the researchers, says Fischer, “was amazing.” The
specific outcomes of the reaction were themselves unexpected, but the
visual evidence was even more so. “Nobody has ever taken direct,
single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and
immediately after a complex organic reaction,” Fischer says.
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