Amazing

It's the first triple carbon bond imagined. It's apparently very short and thick at the same moment.

There's something about looking at pictures of molecules that is almost... spooky. It's hard to pin point the exact feeling they inspire but it's as if we are witnessing a world we are not supposed to see. These images are simply astounding.

I've spent my fair share of time trying to image specific tissues of plants using confocal (http://www.yorku....ile.html , some examples) and that was hard enough! It's humbling really, when you observe the use of a microscope by a master microscopist.

In my lifetime, and I'm not yet 50! Merely seeing super strong flat polycyclics mated to crystal surfaces never excited me like these bowls and tinkertoys do. When you spend long hours for years at a time delving into organic synthesis, you make some very tiny friends, and their creative personalities can outwit and delight you, but you are flying blind a bit, squiggly plots on a printout. I've got some helicene samples around here somewhere, sparkling ruby red, just begging to appear on their microscope stage.

-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry

Amazing but missing something. Molecules aren't 2 dimensional.

Amazing but missing something. Molecules aren't 2 dimensional.

From any other plane these molecules would simply look like a line.

Moebius, the double bonded carbons and six member rings are aromatic, hence they are flat (Pointed out by NikFromNYC). The thickness is measurable by AFM, but best in contact mode. This is not contact mode, and besides, at a 3 angstrom scale, the imagine talent of the microscopist is amazing! I was pretty good at AFM, but better at Confocal and SEM.

On another note, within academia this is useful in that we now know because "seeing is believing" adding much credit to those before us that have laid the foundation for molecular modelling, and that we now see that Organic Chemistry class is not a waste of time!

From any other plane these molecules would simply look like a line.

It wouldn't - the seemingly planar molecules of polyarylenes are deformed and bent due the tension of electrons and attractive delocalization forces of pi-orbitals. Which is clearly visible at the above AFM image after all - the hexagons at the borders of molecules are deformed with perspective and lighter than their interior. The AF microscopy provides more informations than you may think, if you know, where to look at it.

Hey Felix...nice work!

Amazing. So here it is, plainly visible after all these years. It's amazing that people were able to figure out these structures without see them, even over 100 years ago.

天才的杰作

So is the brightness of the outside of the rings because of how close, relatively, they are to the probe, or is that showing us the density of the electron probability field in the bond? We can clearly see the way the pi character of two out of three bonds on the outside spreads out across all three, which is cool. But what I wonder about is the middle bond on the outside of the rings looks brighter. Is that the shape of the molecule, my eyes tricking me, or is the pi character of that middle bond actually slightly more intense than the two bonds around it?

Or is it bond length that tells the tale instead of shininess? Is shininess just shape where bond length tells the real tale?

I don't think I'm phrasing my question very well. Is it just my eyes or does the middle of that shiny "crescent" on the outside of the rings look a bit brighter than the ends? And if so, why?

The AMF image isn't sensitive to electron density like the STM. As I explained above, the thicker borders are more close to scanning tip, because the whole molecule is deformed and bent like the leaf floating at the water surface.

This one brought me back to Physorg. Mind equals blown. It looks just like a molecular skeletal diagram! Is this some trick or manipulation, that the proportions of the bond lengths and the size of the molecules are just as they are in diagrams?