News
Laser wave steers electrons in chemical bonds As is now reported in Science, a team of scientists from the Netherlands (FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics) and Germany (Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching and the Universities of Bielefeld and Hamburg) has demonstrated that the detailed shape of the electric field inside a short light pulse can be used to control the motion of electrons involved in chemical bonding and to change the outcome of a simple chemical reaction. This result - obtained on the dissociation of D2 molecules - may open a new way of steering intra-molecular electron transfer processes like those in DNA base-pairs.
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