A dance of two atoms reveals chemical bonds forming and breaking
Scientists have now captured video of the intimate dance of two atoms as they bond with one another, break apart and come back together again. In a sequence of images from an electron microscope, two atoms of the metal rhenium, bound together to create a molecule, shimmied around one another, moving closer and then farther apart. In videos of such molecules, this atomic do-si-do revealed the bond order, or the number of chemical bonds between the two atoms, and how that bond order changed over time. The closer the atoms were to one another, the greater the number of bonds. At their closest approach, the atoms had four bonds tethering them together. To make imaging easier, scientists trapped the molecules inside carbon nanotubes. But then, in a fortuitous accident, one molecule escaped its confinement and nestled into a gap between two nanotubes. There, the bond between the atoms completely broke before soon reforming, the team reports January 17 in Science Advances. A molecule made...