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Science 2 September 1988:
Vol. 241. no. 4870, pp. 1200 - 1202
DOI: 10.1126/science.241.4870.1200
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Articles

Femtosecond Clocking of the Chemical Bond

MARK J. ROSKER 1, MARCOS DANTUS 1, and AHMED H. ZEWAIL 1

1 Arthur Amos Noyes Laboratory of Chemical Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.

When a chemical bond is broken in a direct dissociation reaction, the process is so rapid that it has generally been considered instantaneous and thus unmeasurable. However, the bond does persist for times on the order of 10-13 seconds after the photon has been absorbed. Femtosecond (10-15 second) laser techniques can be used to directly clock this process, which describes the dynamics of the chemical bond. The time required to break the chemical bond in an elementary reaction has been measured and the characteristic repulsion length for the potential governing fragment separation has been obtained.

Submitted on June 6, 1988
Accepted on July 6, 1988


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Femtosecond time resolution in x-ray diffraction experiments.
R. Neutze and J. Hajdu (1997)
PNAS 94, 5651-5655
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At the crossroads of chemistry and immunology: catalytic antibodies.
R. Lerner, S. Benkovic, and P. Schultz (1991)
Science 252, 659-667
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Laser Femtochemistry.
A. H. Zewail (1988)
Science 242, 1645-1653
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)