In a world first, the team, led by Professor Stephen Liddle, discovered a new type of aromatic molecule made entirely of metal atoms, the heaviest of its kind ever confirmed. The team stabilized an extremely rare three‑atom ring of bismuth, held between two large metal atoms (uranium or thorium) in a structure known as an “inverse‑sandwich” complex.

This breakthrough provides fresh insight into one of chemistry’s most familiar concepts—aromaticity—and shows it can occur not only in carbon‑based rings like benzene, but also in unusual clusters of heavy metals. The paper is published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

How do photosynthetic organisms harvest light so efficiently? To help answer this question, researchers have developed an ultrafast transient absorption microscope with sensitivity approaching the single-molecule level.

Plants and photosynthetic bacteria have a wide variety of light-harvesting antennae in which pigment molecules are precisely arranged to utilize light energy efficiently. However, these molecular arrangements are not perfectly uniform and vary from particle to particle because of conformational distortions and fluctuations. Such structural variations are considered to perturb excited states and energy transfer processes triggered by light absorption. Because these early excitation dynamics initiate a cascade of photosynthetic photochemical reactions, understanding the effects of such fluctuations and heterogeneities is essential for revealing how phototrophic organisms maintain efficient and stable photosynthesis.

To analyze these fluctuations and heterogeneities, single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy has been widely utilized. However, the fluorescence-based approach faces fundamental challenges in observing ultrafast and multistep processes, as well as non-fluorescent dark states and radical species.