About a half-billion years ago, the early Paleozoic seas were filled with now-extinct creatures called trilobites, which had flat, oval, segmented shells. Recently, a team of theoretical physicists saw the trilobite’s shape in the electron cloud they’ve plotted for a hypothetical two-atom rubidium molecule.
Plot depicts the asymmetric trilobite-shaped distribution of an electron shared by two rubidium atoms in a hypothetical molecule.
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