Listen up — U-M experiment records ultrafast chemical reaction with vibrational echoes | Science Blog

Listen up — U-M experiment records ultrafast chemical reaction with vibrational echoes | Science Blog: To sum up, watching the first solvation shell respond to a chemical reaction requires a combination of ultrafast time resolution and the ability to initiate the reaction and track the solvent shell’s response. It is this combination that Kubarych, an assistant professor of chemistry, and graduate student Baiz have achieved.

The key breakthrough was to realize that electrons move during chemical reactions and that when the nearest solvent molecules sense the electron redistribution, their vibrational frequencies change. Much as the strings on a musical instrument are intimately connected to the wooden neck and body, the solvent shell and the reacting molecule are tightly coupled and difficult to disentangle. Indeed, the very act of holding an instrument may cause it to warp or heat up and, in principle, these changes affect the frequencies of vibration of the strings. Similarly, the new approach to reaction dynamics introduced by Kubarych’s lab essentially “listens” to the very fastest events in chemical reactions by noting the changing resonance frequencies of the surrounding molecules.