Speed matters. When an X-ray photon excites an atom or ion, making a core electron jump onto a higher energy level, a ...

Ultrafast electron diffraction enables the study of molecular structural dynamics with atomic resolution at subpicosecond timescales, with applications in solid-state physics and rational drug design.

To investigate such double core-hole states in highly ionized Krypton, a colorless, odorless gas found in trace amounts in ...

Scientists have calculated how it is possible to look inside the atom to image individual electron orbitals. An electron microscope can't just snap a photo like a mobile phone camera can. The ability ...

Scientists have directly measured the minuscule electron sharing that makes precious-metal catalysts so effective. Their new technique, IET, reveals how molecules bind and react on metal surfaces with ...

Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since—so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen ...

It's like catching light in action. For the first time, physicists have measured changes in an atom to the level of zeptoseconds, or trillionths of a billionth of a second – the smallest division of ...

I keep coming back to a strange idea: what if everything we know about quantum physics is already encoded inside a single atom? Not in a mystical sense, but in the very real way that one tiny system ...

Chemistry textbooks typically include illustrations of atoms, but with caveats. The drawings depict atomic nuclei surrounded by electron orbitals—fuzzy spheres, barbells, tripods, and so on—but those ...

Carbon nanotube field emitters are at present the brightest available electron sources but must operate at low currents to avoid Coulomb expansion and are therefore not suitable for ultrafast imaging.