video: An animation describing the technique used by Puri et al. A sample of charged particles are loaded into the apparatus, which localizes charged particles spatially so that they may be studied and controlled. A laser is used to cool the temperature of the particles until they form crystal structures. These particles then react with a gas to form the reactants, which are then visible as new molecules in the crystal. A cloud of uncharged calcium atoms, which are the other reactants in the reaction, are then overlapped with the reactant molecules for a brief time, which permits the reaction to occur. The new hypervalent molecules are visible again in the crystal structure. At this point all of the charged species are ejected into a mass analyzer that detects the mass of the products of the reaction. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Sept. 7, 2017, online issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by P. Puri at University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, Calif., and colleagues was titled, "Synthesis of mixed hypermetallic oxide BaOCa+ from laser-cooled reagents in an atom-ion hybrid trap." view more
Credit: Eric. R. Hudson