An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.
The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.
Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.
“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”
