benzene

In chemistry's storeroom, records of substances no one thought were special gathered dust. It turns out that among them hide 2D materials — thin as a sheet of paper, but strong and with unexpected properties. Scientists ran a computer search through databases, and it pulled out 38 candidates that had not been recognized as 2D before.

In the cold Taurus cloud, where stars are born, telescopes have detected molecules with the smell of bitter almonds — aromatic nitriles. On Earth, you can find them in peach pits, but in space they hang in icy dust. What happens to them under the harsh ultraviolet light of young stars? Chemists recreated this process in the lab.

At the heart of a future quantum computer might lie a tiny organic molecule shaped like a triangle. It has two 'extra' electrons that don't pair up. Such molecules are called diradicals, and their electrons can store information in a special, quantum way.

Imagine an audition for a symphony orchestra, where out of hundreds of hopefuls, only those whose instruments sound pure and withstand the furious crescendo remain. In the world of materials, computers have learned to generate 'atomic scores'—thousands of virtual crystals that promise to become the foundation for quantum chips or superconductors.

A lone potassium atom enters a dense cloud of sodium atoms cooled to near absolute zero. Such a medium is called a Bose–Einstein condensate — all particles merge into a single quantum wave. One might expect the impurity to simply pick up a single neighbor and form a pair. But the experiment showed something else.

A pot of water always boils the same way: hit 100 degrees and bubbles start. Quantum fluids are different. When a cloud of atoms is cooled to near absolute zero, it can turn into a single matter wave — a Bose–Einstein condensate. But the transition itself, it turns out, can happen in three different ways.

In dark, cold clouds of interstellar gas, astronomers have for several years been spotting aromatic molecules — compounds built around a benzene ring (a hexagon of carbon atoms), like the benzene we know. One such substance, benzonitrile (benzene with a cyano group attached), had only been found in very calm and cold places, like the Taurus cloud.

Nitrogen, the very gas we breathe, behaves like a finicky metal under a million atmospheres of pressure. In a diamond anvil cell, it is squeezed to 78–98 gigapascals and heated with a laser to 1800–2500 kelvin. Under these conditions, N₂ molecules rearrange into crystals that can store energy more densely than explosives.

A cold cloud of atoms is like a swarm of fireflies drawn to one another. The attraction between atoms tries to pack them into a single dense ball. But quantum jitter, the unavoidable motion of particles, keeps the ball from collapsing. When the attraction is strong, the cloud breaks into separate clumps.

On the surface of ordinary table salt, a ring of carbon atoms grows, like a bracelet assembled link by link. Only here the links are not metallic but carbon, and they are joined not by a jeweler but by the tip of a scanning microscope.

An ordinary octane molecule is a chain of eight carbon atoms, like a flexible wire. On a hot platinum surface (above 600 K), it doesn't just lie still: it starts to squirm. First, the chain bends so that its ends come closer together.

In the cold cloud TMC-1, where temperatures drop to nine degrees above absolute zero, the QUIJOTE radio telescope picked up a faint 'song' — 22 emission lines from the molecule cyclopent[c,d]indene.