He and Friedrich say they'll first try to catch metal oxides, chemically reactive compounds that can be easily held by magnetic fields. In the future, it may be possible to trap the organic molecules from which living creatures are made. 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.
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. And they are cooled down to within a fraction of the lowest temperature possible, near minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit. That's not the way it is in nature.