This has a direct analog in tracing a path along the surface of a Möbius strip, where you also need to perform two circuits to end up back where you started. In fact, some simple Möbius molecules have been synthesized in the past.
What sets the new research apart is its use of the fact that there are far more options for orbitals and bonds than we see in simple benzene derivatives. The large, international team (which includes both academics and IBM researchers) found a way to create a half-Möbius arrangement, in which the orbitals of a ring-shaped molecule are arranged such that, after a single loop around the molecule, an electron would be neither on the top nor bottom of the molecule, but somewhere around the periphery.
It would need to perform two loops just to end up on the bottom. And then two more loops to end up back where it started.
This isn’t a stable configuration; left on its own, the molecule would collapse into a far more mundane configuration in short order. And there’s no obvious use to it, even assuming we could keep it stable for long enough to test for applications. But it’s an interesting exploration of our ability to manipulate orbital configurations on the molecular level, and there’s no telling how that ability might ultimately pay off.
Like quantum computing, it’s weird and complicated
If you wanted to make something this odd, it’s not necessarily obvious how you would go about it. If tweaking orbital configurations were easy, someone probably would have done it already. And, as the authors of the paper that describes this work note, there are a lot of potential orbital shapes that are allowed by quantum mechanics, but the exact configuration that gets used in a molecule can depend on which of those orbitals are occupied and by how many electrons.
Leave a Reply