Highlights

Benjamin Fingerhut receives the ERC Starting Grant

Dr. Benjamin Fingerhut, junior group leader at the Max Born Institute (MBI), is recipient of the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2018. The project addresses ultrafast biomolecular dynamics via a non-adiabatic theoretical approach. The award is granted by the European Research Council (ERC) to support excellent researchers at the…

Water makes the proton tremble - ultrafast movements and short-lived structures of hydrated protons

Protons in an aqueous environment play a key role in many chemical and biological processes. In Science, Dahms et al. on the direct recording of ultrafast proton motions by means of vibrational spectroscopy. They show that protons in water are predominantly bound between two water molecules, where they perform fluctuating…

The elusive infrared absorption continuum of protons in aqueous environment has been topic of intense controversial debate since half a century. A team of scientists from the Max Born Institute and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, show for the case of the Zundel cation (H2O...H+...OH2) H5O2+ that the surrounding…