An international research team has observed in real time how football molecules made of carbon atoms burst in the beam of an X-ray laser. The study shows the temporal course of the bursting process, which takes less than a trillionth of a second, and is important for the analysis of sensitive proteins and other biomolecules, which are also frequently studied using bright X-ray laser flashes. The football molecules disintegrate more slowly and differently than expected, as the team around Nora Berrah from the University of Connecticut and Robin Santra from DESY report in the journal Nature Physics. This observation contributes to a more detailed protein analysis with X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL).
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Source: Phys.org