Scientists from ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva have developed a new technique that allows them to observe chemical reactions taking place in liquids at extremely high temporal resolution. This innovation enables them to track how molecules change within in mere femtoseconds – in other words
Using their new method, the researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva investigated the first step in this long series of chemical reactions to find out how a concentrated urea solution behaves when exposed to ionizing radiation.
It’s important to know that the urea molecules in a concentrated urea solution group themselves into pairs, or what are known as dimers. As the researchers have now been able to show, ionizing radiation causes a hydrogenwithin each of these dimers to move from one urea molecule to the other. This turns one urea molecule into a protonated urea molecule, and the other into a urea radical.
The researchers also managed to show that this transfer of a hydrogen atom happens extremely quickly, taking only around 150 femtoseconds, or 150 quadrillionths of a second. “That’s so fast that this reaction preempts all other reactions that might theoretically also take place,” Wörner says. “This explains why concentrated urea solutions produce urea radicals rather than hosting other reactions that would produce other molecules.
As for their new method, it can also generally be used to examine the precise sequence of chemical reactions in liquids. “A whole host of important chemical reactions take place in liquids – not just all biochemical processes in the human body, but also a great many chemical syntheses relevant to industry,” Wörner says. “This is why it’s so important that we have now expanded the scope of X-ray spectroscopy at high temporal resolution to include reactions in liquids.
Reference: “Femtosecond proton transfer in urea solutions probed by X-ray spectroscopy” by Zhong Yin, Yi-Ping Chang, Tadas Balčiūnas, Yashoj Shakya, Aleksa Djorović, Geoffrey Gaulier, Giuseppe Fazio, Robin Santra, Ludger Inhester, Jean-Pierre Wolf and Hans Jakob Wörner, 28 June 2023,
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