A new method combines helium droplets with ultrashort laser pulses to initiate chemical processes in a controlled manner. This provides insights into the transfer of energy and charge during the ...

Hannah J. Sayre is in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. Harsh Bhatia is in the ...

Boron, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen: these four elements can form chemical triple bonds with each other due to their similar electronic properties. Examples of this are the gas carbon monoxide, which ...

Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist in San Francisco, California. For a little more than a century, chemists have known that strong atomic links called covalent bonds are formed when atoms ...

The willingness of the 4f orbitals of lanthanide metals to participate in chemical reactions is as rare as their presence in Earth's crust. A recent study, however, witnessed the 4f orbital in a ...

It’s difficult to make molecules using elements that lie beyond uranium on the periodic table, which has hampered progress in studying how actinides form bonds. Now chemists have expanded the library ...

Engineers dream of using nanoparticles to build designer materials, and the new theory can help guide efforts to make nanoparticles assemble into useful structures. The theory explains earlier results ...