Vibrational energy antenna offers ‘a completely new way to run a reaction’

‘This is a completely new way to run a reaction that no one ever thought of before,’ says Alec Wodtke from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany about his team’s first-of-a-kind system that harvests vibrational energy from infrared light and uses it to do an isomerisation. ‘We can put energy into a system in a way that’s going beyond what’s possible with simply thermal energy,’ Wodtke adds. One day, this could allow chemists to carry out reactions that are impossible to do by traditional synthesis.