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Attosecond laboratory view: A vacuum chamber, inside of which is a cluster of water ionized by laser pulses, seen on the left. Credit: ETH Zurich / HJ Wörner Almost all important chemical processes occur in aqueous solutions. In such processes, a decisive role is played by electrons that are exchanged between different atoms and molecules and thereby, for example, creating or breaking chemical bonds. However, the details of how that happens are difficult to investigate because the electrons are moving so fast. Researchers at ETH Zurich led by Hans Jakob Wörner, professor of physical chemistry, in collaboration with colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA) have now succeeded in studying electron dynamics in clusters made of water molecules with a time resolution of just a few attoseconds. Their results recently appeared as follow-up publications in scientific journals Natural . Delay in ionization In their experim

For the first time, physicists have witnessed something very interesting: electrons form eddies like liquids. This behavior is one that scientists have long predicted, but never observed before. And that could be the key to developing next-generation electronics that are more efficient and faster. “Electron vortex is expected in theory, but there is no direct evidence yet, and seeing is believing,” said one of the researchers behind the new study, physicist Leonid Levitov of MIT. “Now we’ve seen it, and it’s a clear sign of being in this new regime, where electrons behave as liquids, not as individual particles.” While electrons flowing in a vortex might not sound like a breakthrough, it’s a big deal because flowing like a liquid results in more energy being sent to the end point, instead of being lost on the way while the electrons are pushed around by things like impurities in matter or vibrations in atoms. “We know that when an electron enters a liquid state, [energy] dissipation d