(ORDO NEWS) — Chemistry takes effort. Whether it’s raising the temperature, increasing the chance that compatible atoms collide in a hot collision, or raising the pressure and squeezing them together, building molecules usually requires a certain amount of energy.
Quantum theory. provides a workaround if you are patient. And a team of researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria has finally seen quantum tunneling in action in the world‘s first experiment to measure the fusion of deuterium ions with hydrogen molecules.
Tunneling is a quantum quirk. A universe in which it seems that particles can pass through obstacles that are usually too difficult to overcome.
In chemistry, this obstacle represents the energy required to bond atoms to each other or to existing molecules.
However, the theory states that in extremely rare cases, atoms in close proximity can “tunnel” their way through this energy barrier and bond effortlessly.
“Quantum mechanics allows particles to break through the energy barrier due to their quantum mechanical wave properties, and a reaction occurs,” says first author Robert Wild, an experimental physicist at the University of Innsbruck.
Quantum waves are ghosts that govern the behavior of objects such as electrons, photons, and even entire groups of atoms blur their existence before any observation, so they do not sit in any one particular place, but occupy a continuum of possible positions.
This blurring is negligible for larger objects such as molecules, cats, and galaxies. But as we zoom in on individual subatomic particles, the range of possibilities expands, causing the location states of the various quantum waves to overlap.
When this happens, particles have a small chance of appearing where they are not needed. creature, tunneling into areas that would otherwise require a lot of effort to penetrate.
One of these areas for an electron can be in the bonding zone of a chemical reaction, connecting neighboring atoms and molecules without the explosion-collision-collision of heat or pressure.
Understanding the role that quantum tunneling plays in the construction and rearrangement of molecules could have important implications for calculating the energy release in nuclear reactions, such as those involving hydrogen. in stars and fusion reactors here on Earth.
Although we have modeled this phenomenon for examples involving reactions between the negatively charged form of deuterium, the neutron-containing isotope of hydrogen, and the dihydrogen r H 2 , experimental proof of the numbers requires a high level of precision.
To achieve this, Wilde and his colleagues cooled negative deuterium ions to a temperature close to the pause before introducing a gas composed of hydrogen molecules.
Without heat, a deuterium ion would be much less likely to have the energy needed to force hydrogen molecules to rearrange atoms. However, it also made the particles sit quietly next to each other, giving them more time to connect via tunneling.
“In our experiment, we let the reactions possible in the trap for about 15 minutes, and then we determine the amount of hydrogen ions formed. From their number, we can determine how often the reaction took place,” explains Wilde.
This figure is just over 5 x 10 -20 reactions per second. space in every cubic centimeter, or about one tunneling event in about every one hundred billion collisions. So not much. Although the experiment does support previous simulations by confirming a benchmark that can be used in forecasts elsewhere.
This tunneling plays a rather important role in a variety of nuclear and chemical reactions, many of which are also probable to occur in the cold depths of space, an accurate understanding of the factors at play gives us a stronger basis for our predictions.
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