Researchers around the world are working to develop better materials for converting CO2 into usable chemicals, a task that is especially urgent given the warming climate. A team from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and the National Institute of Science in Ulsan, South Korea, discovered a promising (The formation and breaking of chemical bonds within “nano-confined” particles) new method: energy-efficient particles are nanoconfined, which means they are placed in the environment while leaving little space for the particles alone. – above which serves as a conductive electron supplier. These molecules promote specific chemical reactions. Such hybrid systems exploit both the properties of molecules and the properties of seeds. The results were published in Science Advances.
The first step for the team was to drop catalytically active particles such as steam onto polished silver before examining them with a high-speed scanning tunneling microscope built in Göttingen. “To our surprise, the particles magically arrange themselves into monolayer structures near the surface,” Lucas Paul, a PhD student at the University of Göttingen and who the book says.
“In addition to taking pictures of individual molecules, the energy of the injected electrons can be directly observed in a scanning microscope that allows chemical reactions to be triggered and observed. chemical reactions within a single molecule,” explains scientist Professor Martin Wenderoth. Wenderoth led the project with chemist professor Inke Siewert, at the University of Göttingen’s Collaborative Research Center 1073 “Atomic-scale control of energy converter”. Siewert adds: “We are able to break down each specific chemical bond.”
The researchers showed that the particles that are too large on the surface have changed the chemical reaction. Therefore, only for molecules that are “laid down”, the bond can be broken and later restored, since the fragmented part can only move a little away from the rest of the molecule. “It shows how vacuum, at the atomic level, can be used to manipulate chemical reactions,” says first author Ole Bunjes, of the University of Göttingen.
The research team hopes that their experiments will contribute to the development of better weather systems with well-defined properties. Furthermore, they wanted to investigate whether their new system was suitable as a molecular data store.
