There’s a 'secret' chemical reaction happening in water where atoms just wander off the path and break all the standard rules of chemistry.
arXiv · March 16, 2026 · 2603.12778
Why it matters
Usually, chemical reactions follow a strict, predictable path between atoms. This discovery shows that hydrogen atoms in water can actually break away and wander around before deciding where to land, a chaotic behavior never before seen in the world's most common liquid.
From the abstract
Water mediates a broad range of chemical reactions, including proton transfer, bond rearrangement, and conventional radical processes, defining a continuously expanding repertoire of intrinsic reactivity. However, roaming, a fundamental reaction mechanism that a departing fragment bypasses the minimum energy path to recombine, has not been identified in water itself. Here, we report the discovery of hydrogen-atom roaming reactions in water clusters through high-precision ab initio calculations o