Things great and small

By SHERRI CRUZ
2013-05-13 09:02:03
Ara Apkarian hula-hoops his hips, demonstrating the way a single
electron moves inside a molecule.
The chemistry professor is in his lab at UC Irvine Center for Chemistry
at the Space-Time Limit.
"At the end of the day, we understand what one electron is doing in
one molecule, and it turns out it is a hula-hoop pattern," he said.
Apkarian is into molecules, a group of two or more atoms sharing
electrons.
All things, living and non-living, are made of molecules, which
Apkarian describes as if they were people. They are happy. They light up. They dance. They play in an
orchestra, or play their own song.
"It's almost like molecules have individual characters," he said.
Apkarian directs the research center, funded with a multiyear $20 million grant by the National Science
Foundation. Among other research, the center's ultimate goal is to develop a "chemiscope," an instrument
that would allow researchers to watch a single molecule in action.
"If you can see, you can understand, you can interfere, you can control," he said.
The chemiscope would be much more powerful than a microscope.
"The microscope was the major accelerator of science," Apkarian said. "To be able to see a molecule, we
need to increase the resolution of the best microscope by a factor of 10,000."
Molecular movement is measured in femtoseconds, which are 1,000th of a millionth of a millionth of a
second. That's million times shorter than a nanosecond, which is one billionth of a second.
UCI researchers now view molecules via a "scanning tunneling microscope," sort of a pre-chemiscope
created by Wilson Ho, a UCI professor of physics, astronomy and chemistry, recently elected to National
Academy of Sciences. Ho also works at the center.
It looks like a machine that could take you back in time. Some of its recognizable parts include a flashlight
and a lot of aluminum foil. It took two years to fabricate.
"Because it was built here, there is no customer service," said Alejandro Rodriguez Perez, a graduate
student researcher at the center. "If it breaks, we have to figure it out."
The microscope isolates a single molecule in a clean chamber and then freezes it to minus 270 degrees
Celsius.
Once isolated and viewed, the molecules become quantum mechanical objects, Apkarian said.
"At the scale we're talking about, molecules are no longer classical balls and sticks" like the atoms (balls)
and bonds (sticks) drawings in your high school textbook, he said.
Instead, the molecules behave as particle waves.
"Conceptually, it's a difficult thing to digest," he said.
The lab uses ultra-fast lasers to record the movements of molecules by generating flashes of light, similar
to the flash of a camera but for a much shorter duration.
"Molecules move in a beautiful pattern, collectively and individually," Apkarian said. "The motion isn't
random."
Their movement looks like a spiraling yin-yang symbol.
"We make molecules dance to the tune of light," he said.
A chemiscope would combine the scanning tunneling microscope with the laser light and the bearing on
science overall would be sweeping, Apkarian believes.
"There would be a complete paradigm shift in how we think, how we ask questions, how we teach," he
said.
Common questions asked of fundamental science researchers are: So what can you do with this
research? Can you turn it into a product?
"Singling out an immediate application that affects daily life is likely to be short-sighted," the professor said.
"The applications are endless."
Apkarian is devoted to the work and often can't help but work late into the morning hours. "It's a complete
work of passion, and maybe obsession," he said.
He's reeled in by the sense of discovery.
"You're doing things no one has done," he said. "People think there is no art in science, but there is. Every
day, you really discover something new."
As an undergrad student at USC, where Apkarian began studying lasers, he didn't think the things he does
now were even possible. He got into lasers when he volunteered for a special project that got him out of
having to do five lab assignments.
After building one or two lasers, he fell in love with light. "Light is amazing," he said.
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