Water Molecules Are Actually Dancing

An investigation, recently published in Nature, and carried out by scientists at Stockholm University has shown that liquid water is much more complex than meets the eye. With the use of the x-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California the team of scientists have probed the finer movements of liquid water on incredibly short timescales. 'A schematic of the approach used to capture water dynamics on the ultrafast timescale. If one were able to photograph the molecules in real space with different exposure times, the image would become gradually blurry because of the motion of the molecules. This is done with x-ray scattering in the so-called reciprocal space, where the diffraction pattern is gradually smoother for longer pulse durations.' This experimental investigation is the first of its kind to'photograph' water molecules on timescales as short as millionths of a billionth of a second.