近日，德国马克斯·普朗克核物理研究所Till Jahnke团队研究了复杂分子结构的集体量子涨落成像。该研究于2025年8月7日发表于《科学》杂志。
由于海森堡测不准原理，分子的结构即使在基态也会围绕其平均几何构型涨落。通过实验观察这种基本的量子效应（特别是揭示结构量子涨落的集体性质），对于复杂分子而言仍是一个尚未解决的挑战。
在这项工作中，研究组通过X射线自由电子激光诱导11原子分子的库仑爆炸实现了这一目标。研究表明，结构涨落表现在通过同步检测单个分子原子碎片获得的离子动量的相关变化中。
尽管研究组的测量只覆盖了整个33维动量空间的一小部分，但该分析方案实现了探测这些变化，从而建立了一种使用库仑爆炸获取高维结构动力学信息的通用方法。
附：英文原文
Title: Imaging collective quantum fluctuations of the structure of a complex molecule
Author: Benot Richard, Rebecca Boll, Sourav Banerjee, Julia M. Schfer, Zoltan Jurek, Gregor Kastirke, Kilian Fehre, Markus S. Schffler, Nils Anders, Thomas M. Baumann, Sebastian Eckart, Benjamin Erk, Alberto De Fanis, Reinhard Drner, Sven Grundmann, Patrik Grychtol, Max Hofmann, Markus Ilchen, Max Kircher, Katharina Kubicek, Maksim Kunitski, Xiang Li, Tommaso Mazza, Severin Meister, Niklas Melzer, Jacobo Montano, Valerija Music, Yevheniy Ovcharenko, Christopher Passow, Andreas Pier, Nils Rennhack, Jonas Rist, Daniel E. Rivas, Daniel Rolles, Ilme Schlichting, Lothar Ph. H. Schmidt, Philipp Schmidt, Daniel Trabert, Florian Trinter, Rene Wagner, Peter Walter, Pawel Ziolkowski, Artem Rudenko, Michael Meyer, Robin Santra, Ludger Inhester, Till Jahnke
Issue&Volume: 2025-08-07
Abstract: Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the structure of a molecule fluctuates about its mean geometry, even in the ground state. Observing this fundamental quantum effect experimentally—particularly, revealing the collective nature of the structural quantum fluctuations—remains an unmet challenge for complex molecules. In this work, we achieved this for an 11-atom molecule by inducing its Coulomb explosion with an x-ray free-electron laser. We show that the structural fluctuations manifest themselves in correlated variations of ion momenta obtained through coincident detection of the atomic fragments from individual molecules. Our analysis scheme allows extracting these variations, despite our measurements covering only a fraction of the full 33-dimensional momentum space, thereby establishing a general approach for extracting information on high-dimensional structural dynamics using Coulomb explosion.
DOI: adu2637
Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu2637