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Physical chemistry

Single molecules filmed dancing on a table top

Nature volume 483, pages 162–163 (2012)Cite this article

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By ripping an electron away from a molecule and then slamming it back again, the motion of nuclei in a molecule has been tracked with extremely high temporal and spatial resolution. See Letter p.194

In 1909, the physicists Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden shot α-particles (helium nuclei) at a thin gold foil1. Following the suggestion of Ernest Rutherford, they were looking for (and found) a substantial number of particles that were deflected by the foil at angles larger than 90° — rather than passing straight through it, as ideas about the structure of atoms predicted. According to Rutherford2, the discovery “was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” Rutherford concluded3 from these results that atoms have very compact nuclei, where all of their positive charge is concentrated, surrounded by much more loosely spaced electrons. The α-particles rebounded because they collided head-on with fully charged gold nuclei.

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Figure 1: Molecular movies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Misha Y. Ivanov is in the Department of Physics, andat the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and the Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.,

    Misha Y. Ivanov

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  1. Misha Y. Ivanov
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Correspondence to Misha Y. Ivanov.

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Ivanov, M. Single molecules filmed dancing on a table top. Nature 483, 162–163 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/483161a

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