December 14, 2020
Sometimes atoms, like pets and adventuresome hikers, slip loose and wander off into the wild. Their final destination isn’t known, and their trajectory can be all over the map. It’s not so easy to track their path.
But an international research team that includes Paul Houston, the Peter J.W. Debye Professor Emeritus of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has done just that: They’ve made the first direct observation, in real time, of an elusive phenomenon – “roaming” reactions, in which a chemical compound breaks apart and its molecular fragments drift chaotically in orbit before re-forming into new compounds.