Observing the unobservable: Researchers measure electron orbitals of molecules in 3-D

Many of you will remember them from your physics lessons at school: often represented as colourful clouds or balloons, electron orbitals provide information on the whereabouts of the electrons in atoms and molecules. Scientists from the University of Graz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt have now succeeded in experimentally recording these structures in all three dimensions. They achieved this by further developing a method they had already applied two ye...