Water ice renders short-lived molecule sustainable
Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - 16:00
in Physics & Chemistry
"Antiaromatic compounds" is what chemists call a class of ring molecules which are extremely instable—the opposite of the highly stable aromatic molecules. Because they exist for mere split seconds, they can only be detected by extremely demanding, ultra fast methods. Together with colleagues from Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mulheim, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence RESOLV at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have succeeded in isolating the antiaromatic fluorenyl cation at extremely low temperatures in water ice. Thus, they were able to conduct a spectroscopic analysis for the very first time.