New subatomic monitoring technology confirms 30 years unknown

So far, the remark subatomic structures It has outpaced the precision ability of live imaging methods, but a new technology has changed things and allowed us to definitively verify the existence of the so-called holes sigmas, which was a theory 30 years ago.

Thus, a Czech multidisciplinary team presented a method that allowed them to be the first to observe the inhomogeneous charge distribution of electrons around halogen atom, i.e. a sigma hole and the final confirmation of the concept of halogen bonds, is published Science.

The authors compare the results with The first picture from U.S Black hole, which is located in the middle 87 – Nada, which was released in 2019, but whose existence was predicted in 1915 by Albert Einstein in the general theory of relativity.

This progress will facilitate understanding of the interactions between atoms or individual molecules, as well as chemical reactions, and opens the way for improving the physical and structural properties of various physical, biological and chemical systems, according to the research team.

For one of the paper’s authors, Pavel Jelinek of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU) it is “not an exaggeration” to say that obtaining images of sigma holes represents at the atomic level a significant milestone similar to black holes.

This phenomenon is indirectly demonstrated by the halogen-bonded X-ray crystal structures, revealing the surprising fact that the chemically bonded halogen atoms of one molecule and the nitrogen or oxygen atoms of another molecule, which must repel, are close together and thus attract each other.

This observation was in contradiction to the hypothesis that these atoms have a homogeneous negative charge and are repelled by the electrostatic force.

This heterogeneous charge distribution leads to the formation of a halogen bond, which plays a key role, among other things, in supramolecular chemistry, including molecular crystal engineering, and in biological systems.

“When I first saw the sigma hole, I was certainly skeptical, because it indicates that we have crossed the precision limit of microscopes down to the subatomic level,” recalls one of the authors, FZU’s Bruno de la Torre.

However, once accepted, he felt “proud” of the contribution the team made to overcoming the limitations of the experiment and “satisfied to open a path for other researchers to move forward and apply this knowledge to discover new effects at the atomic level.”

With information from EFE