To date, the real-time video, recorded by scientists from the University of Toronto, of atoms undergoing a transformation to become a new structure offers the best resolution yet, according to an Apr. 18, 2013 news item on Azonano,
“It’s the first look at how chemistry and biology involve just a few key motions for even the most complex systems,” says U of T [University of Toronto] chemistry and physics professor R. J. Dwayne Miller, principal investigator of the study. “There is an enormous reduction in complexity at the defining point, the transition state region, which makes chemical processes transferrable from one type of molecule to another. This is how new drugs or materials are made.”
Miller, who holds a joint appointment as director of the Max Planck Research Group for Structural Dynamics at the Centre for Free Electron Laser Science, conducted the research with colleagues from institutions in Germany and Japan. He says nature uses this reduction principle at transition states to breathe life into otherwise inanimate matter.
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“The first atomic movies were very grainy, much like the first motion pictures,” says Miller. “The new movies are so clear one could dare say they are becoming beautiful to behold, especially when you remember you are looking at atoms moving on the fly. We’ve captured them at an incredibly fast rate of less than 1 millionth of a millionth of a second per frame.”
In the Apr. 17, 2013 University of Toronto news release, which originated the news item, Miller provides a description of the complexity,
To help illuminate what’s going on here, Miller explains that with two atoms there is only one possible coordinate or dimension for following the chemical pathway. With three atoms, two dimensions are now needed. However, with a complex molecule, it would be expected that hundreds or even thousands of dimensions would be required to map all possible trajectories of the atoms.
“In this case, chemistry would be a completely new problem for every molecule,” says Miller. “But somehow there is an enormous reduction in dimensions to just a few motions, and we are now able to see exactly how this works at the atomic level of detail.”
Unfortunately, I was not able to successfully bring over the movie but you can try accessing it from here.