An international research team, led by Akitoshi Shiotari of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (FHI, Germany), Mariana Rossi of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD, Germany) and Takashi Kumagai of the Institute for Molecular Science/SOKENDAI (IMS, Japan) has successfully achieved the single-molecule spectroscopic observation of hydrogen (H2) and deuterium (D2) confined within a picocavity. The picocavity was formed between a silver nanotip and a silver single-crystal substrate under cryogenic and ultrahigh vacuum conditions, using tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS).
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