Often depicted as colorful balloons or clouds, electron orbitals provide information on the whereabouts of electrons in molecules, a bit like fuzzy snapshots. In order to understand the exchange of ...

Evidence has been found for a new type of electron pairing that may broaden the search for new high-temperature superconductors. The findings provide the basis for a unifying description of how ...

Atomic orbitals exist, sort of. The lobes, spheres, and donuts familiar to many chemists are like a map of where you might find electrons around a nucleus. The geometric patterns and motifs that atoms ...

Speeding up chemical reactions is key to improving industrial processes or mitigating unwanted or harmful waste. Realizing these improvements requires that chemists design around documented reaction ...

An animation shows how an infrared laser beam (orange) triggers atomic vibrations in a thin layer of iron selenide, which are then recorded by ultrafast X-ray laser pulses to create an ultrafast movie ...

It’s a helpful rule of thumb: Main group elements prefer forming bonds that give them eight valence electrons; transition metals go for 18 electrons. Now scientists have shown that main group elements ...

For the first time, scientists have used ultrafast X-ray flashes to take a direct image of a single electron as it moved during a chemical reaction. In the new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal ...

The disagreements between calculations of the benzene energy states by the method of antisymmetric molecular orbitals (A.S.M.O.) and by the augmented valence-bond theory given in previous papers ...