Scientists “finally see” a proton move in water, and it only took 200 years

For more than two centuries, scientists know that water transports a positive load through protons. But they had never seen him occur – so far.

In a scientific article published on September 11, Yale researchers reported that they had designed a method to follow, measure and “see” the trip of a proton in water. For experience, the team used a mass spectrometer 30 feet long – an instrument that separates different mass elements – which has taken years to personalize and refine. The device allowed them to compare the speed with which the protons moved through six loaded water molecules.

“We show what is happening in a tiny molecular system where there is no room for protons to hide,” said Mark Johnson, principal author of the study and chemist at the University of Yale, in a statement.

Solve an apparently obvious mystery

There is an surprisingly long list of things in the science that we know – or strongly suspect – to be true, but which have never been directly confirmed or still have no good explanations.

This did not prevent scientists and engineers from using these ideas still to be confirmed to achieve remarkable breakthroughs. Protons in water, for example, play a role in “Everything, from view to fuel energy storage of rockets”, explained the researchers.

But the protons are terribly small and have quantum mechanical properties, which makes them frustrating to follow.

“They are not polite enough to stay in a place long enough to allow us to observe them easily,” said Johnson. “We think they lead the charge by a relay mechanism at the atomic scale, in which protons jump from molecule molecule.”

Trapped in a biological “taxi”

To observe these processes in action, Johnson and his team used 4-aminobenzoic acid, an organic molecule capable of taking an additional proton in two different sites. The two locations can be distinguished by the color of the light they absorb, said that the author of the Payten Harville study, a postdoctoral student in Yale, in the press release.

For experience, the team attached the 4-aminobenzoic acid molecules to the six water molecules. Harville explained that in this configuration, protons can only “go from one mooring site to another (while reaching) a journey on a” taxi “of the water network.

When the protons “reach” on the taxi, the specialized mass spectrometer of the team analyzes “destructively” each reaction ten times per second with carefully timed lasers, the researchers explained.

To be clear, the experience has still not caught the intermediate stages of the proton path through water. However, it defines the strictest parameters in the process so far, Johnson said.

“We are able to provide parameters that will give theorists a well-defined target for their chemical simulations, which are omnipresent but have not been disputed by experimental references,” he added.

Indeed, if this technology could extend beyond Yale’s personalized spectrometer, it could give an additional boost to the precision of experiences in fundamental chemistry. Given how it took a 200 -year science to get to this point, take a few others to really drive this method at home should be a shorter wait.