Berry pseudorotation enabled photodissociation of Fe(CO)5 observed by ultrafast electron diffraction
Haoran Ma, J. Pedro F. Nunes, Ambar Banerjee, Martin Centurion, Kareem Hegazy, Renkai Li, Yusong Liu, Xiaozhe Shen, Xijie Wang, Stephen Weathersby, Philippe Wernet, Thomas J. A. Wolf, Michael Odelius, Jie Yang · 2026
Read Berry pseudorotation enabled photodissociation of Fe(CO)5 observed by ultrafast electron diffraction by Haoran Ma, J. Pedro F. Nunes, Ambar Banerjee, Martin Centurion, Kareem Hegazy, Renkai Li, Yusong Liu, Xiaozhe Shen, Xijie Wang, Stephen Weathersby, Philippe Wernet, Thomas J. A. Wolf, Michael Odelius, Jie Yang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13234148.txt.
Description
Haoran Ma and colleagues published a 2026 chemistry study filming a metal carbonyl molecule fall apart in extreme slow motion. Iron pentacarbonyl, Fe(CO)5, is a workhorse of industrial chemistry, and light can knock one of its five carbon monoxide arms off. Using mega-electron-volt ultrafast electron diffraction, the team tracked the molecule's shape along its axial and equatorial directions as the reaction began.
The angle-resolved view revealed how the skeleton rearranges before any arm leaves. Vibrations couple together on the way to the crossing point between energy states, and that coupling lets the molecule swap its arms' identities through Berry pseudorotation, a classic shape-shifting dance. As a result, the arm that finally departs is effectively random. The observations sketch the excited energy landscape that steers the breakup.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Haoran Ma, J. Pedro F. Nunes, Ambar Banerjee, Martin Centurion, Kareem Hegazy, Renkai Li, Yusong Liu, Xiaozhe Shen, Xijie Wang, Stephen Weathersby, Philippe Wernet, Thomas J. A. Wolf, Michael Odelius, Jie Yang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 37 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |