From Beam Damage to Massive Reaction Amplification under the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain Reaction in Crystals of a Dewar Benzene

Krzysztof A Konieczny; Indrajit Paul; Jose A Rodriguez; Miguel A Garcia-Garibay

doi:10.1021/acscentsci.4c01429

From Beam Damage to Massive Reaction Amplification under the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain Reaction in Crystals of a Dewar Benzene

ACS Cent Sci. 2024 Dec 6;10(12):2346-2352. doi: 10.1021/acscentsci.4c01429. eCollection 2024 Dec 25.

Authors

Krzysztof A Konieczny^{1

2}, Indrajit Paul¹, Jose A Rodriguez¹, Miguel A Garcia-Garibay¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, United States.
² Faculty of Chemistry, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wybrzeże Wyspiańskiego 27, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland.

Abstract

Electron microscopy in its various forms is one of the most powerful imaging and structural elucidation methods in nanotechnology where sample information is generally limited by random chemical and structural damage. Here we show how a well-selected chemical probe can be used to transform indiscriminate chemical damage into clean chemical processes that can be used to characterize some aspects of the interactions between high-energy electron beams and soft organic matter. Crystals of a Dewar benzene exposed to a 300 keV electron beam facilitate a clean valence-bond isomerization radical-cation chain reaction where the number of chemical events per incident electron is amplified by a factor of up to ca. 90,000.