In an upcoming Nature Chemistry, Heard’s team explains its finding with a phenomenon called quantum tunneling. Ordinarily, a chemical reaction occurs only if the reacting molecules have enough energy to overcome a threshold known as the energy barrier, which is like a hill. But a peculiar consequence of quantum mechanics is that molecules can occasionally bypass that hill without the requisite energy. “A particle can go right through the bottom of the mountain, almost as if the mountain weren’t there,” says Eric Herbst, an astrochemist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/351444/description/Interstellar_chemistry_makes_use_of_quantum_shortcut
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:03:05 +0000
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