A new study shows how soccer ball-shaped molecules burst more slowly than expected when blasted with an X-ray laser beam.
As reported in Nature Physics, an international research team observed how soccer ball-shaped molecules made of carbon atoms burst in the beam of an X-ray laser. The molecules, called buckminsterfullerenes – buckyballs for short – consist of 60 carbon atoms arranged in alternating pentagons and hexagons like the leather coat of a soccer ball. These molecules were expected to break into fragments after being bombarded with photons, but the researchers watched in real time as buckyballs resisted the attack and delayed their break-up.
The team was led by Nora Berrah, a professor at the University of Connecticut, and included researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. The researchers focused their attention on examining the role of chemical effects, such as chemical bonds and charge transfer, on the buckyball’s fragmentation.
Using X-ray laser pulses from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the team showed how the bursting process, which takes only a few hundred femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second, unfolds over time. The results will be important for the analysis of sensitive proteins and other biomolecules, which are also frequently studied using bright X-ray laser flashes, and they also strengthen confidence in protein analysis with X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs).
Image: An illustration shows how soccer ball-shaped molecules called buckyballs ionize and break up when blasted with an X-ray laser. A team of experimentalists and theorists identified chemical bonds and charge transfers as crucial factors that significantly delayed the fragmentation process by about 600 millionths of a billionth of a second.
Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
For additional information: article published on the DESY website