A web of laser beams would attract and hold these molecules by interacting with their electrons. The moth has enough energy to fly by, but doesn't. Molecules would also have enough energy to escape but collisions with the helium gas should slow them enough to fall into the trap. Herschbach won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research with beams of molecules that are collided with each other. By capturing and measuring the fragments, he and his colleagues obtained the first detailed picture of what happens when two molecules react chemically.
Trapping is the next step in taming molecular mobs.
Recently, he and Friedrich developed a way to eliminate the random tumbling of molecules so that the molecules all can be oriented in the same direction. That will enable us to obtain a slow-motion view of what goes on when two chemicals react with each other. Herschbach will describe their experiments at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco next month. Waves Matter Air is pumped out of the traps, of course, to prevent unwanted collisions with air molecules. And they are cooled down to within a fraction of the lowest temperature possible, near minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit.