Attosecond measurement of electrons in water cluster
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