Terahertz pulses manipulate molecular networks
A newly developed “tractor beam”
can be used to manipulate networks of molecules, essentially softening crystals
without heating them up.
Until now, softening methods always have raised the temperature
of crystals, changing their structure and properties, often with undesirable effects.
The new technique uses terahertz pulses and could be broadly applicable to pharmaceutical
and other chemical industries.
A team at the Koichiro Tanaka lab at Kyoto University’s
Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences used intense terahertz pulses to
increase the amplitude of movement between amino acid molecules in crystalline form,
which, in essence, softened the crystals. The article, written by Mukesh Jewariya,
Masaya Nagai and Koichiro Tanaka, was published online Nov. 11, 2010, in
Physical
Review Letters.
“What we have demonstrated is that it is possible to use
intense terahertz pulses to climb 20 ladder steps on the anharmonic intermolecular
potential in the microcrystals,” said Nagai, an assistant professor at the
university’s physics department. “This opens the door to the possibility
of manipulating large molecules, thereby increasing understanding of the properties
of molecular complexes such as proteins.”
The team expects the technique to lead to eventual advances in
chemical synthesis as well as in the refining of organic molecular crystals for
pharmaceutical purposes.
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