Fluorine surprises by becoming heaviest atom ever to quantum tunnel

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that fluorine atoms can quantum tunnel. As 100 years of quantum mechanics is celebrated this year, this new breakthrough opens new avenues for controlling chemical reactions and better understanding of the chemistry of fluorinated compounds.

Quantum tunnelling allows a particle to effectively pass through an energetic barrier that it doesn’t have enough energy to surmount. It’s the result of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics that is most noticeable for very small particles with little mass such as electrons or hydrogen atoms. For these particles, there is a small chance that they could be found on the other side of, or even within, a barrier – and they routinely are. Despite the oddness of this effect it is an everyday occurrence and is critical to real-world applications such as nuclear fusion and scanning tunnelling microscopy.