The LCLS X-ray laser has allowed physicists to "catapult" almost all of the electrons of a single atom in a molecule and temporarily transform it into a miniature analogue of a black hole that attracts electrons to itself with the power of its cosmic counterpart, according to an article published in the journal Nature.
© RIA Novosti / Alina Polyanina // DESY / Science Communication Lab
“The force with which the electrons were attracted to the iodine atom in this case was much greater than that which would be generated, for example, by a black hole with a mass of ten Suns. In principle, the gravitational field of any black hole of stellar mass is unable to act on an electron in a comparable way, even if it is very close to the event horizon,”says Robin Santra of the German Synchrotron Center DESY.
Santra and his colleagues created a similar miniature black hole by focusing the entire beam of the LCLS X-ray laser, currently the most powerful of its kind in the world, at a point only 100 nanometers wide. This is approximately equal to the length of a large organic molecule and several hundred times less than the beam width usually used in experiments with such emitters.
Thanks to this, the power of the laser beam reached ten billion gigawatts per square centimeter, getting close to the point where ultrarelativistic effects begin to manifest themselves and light begins to spontaneously turn into matter and antimatter.
The collision of such a pulse with single atoms of xenon and iodine, as shown by the first experiments of physicists, leads to the fact that they lose virtually all of their electrons and acquire a fantastically high oxidation state - +48 or +47, resulting in a record high positive charge.
Scientists decided to test how this charge can affect the behavior of other molecules and atoms by combining iodine with methane and ethane molecules that are "transparent" to X-rays and do not respond to such rays.
The results of these experiments turned out to be fantastic - irradiation of such molecules with a laser for only 30 nanoseconds led to the fact that the iodine atoms turned into a kind of electric black holes for moments after they were pierced by the X-ray beam.
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These atoms, contrary to the expectations of scientists, lost much more electrons - not 46 or 47, but 53 or 54 particles. The process did not stop there, and the iodine atoms, like supermassive black holes, began to pull on themselves electrons from other parts of the molecule, accelerate and "spit out" them in the form of beams similar to the emissions of their cosmic "cousins".
As a result, the entire iodomethane molecule virtually instantly disintegrated itself, living only a trillionth of a second after the start of the laser fire. Something similar, as scientists believe, can occur when living organisms come into contact with X-rays, and studying this process will help us understand how to reduce or neutralize the harm from radiation.
“Iodomethane is a relatively simple molecule that helps us understand what happens to organic molecules when they are damaged by radiation. We believe that this reaction proceeds even more violently in iodoethane and other complex molecules, where iodine can eject up to 60 electrons, but we do not yet know how it can be described. Solving this problem is our next goal,”concludes Artem Rudenko from the University of Kansas (USA), the first author of the article.
