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Fastest-Ever Flashgun Captures Image of Light Wave
loconet writes to tell us that a team of researchers have created the shortest-ever flash of light. Weighing in at just 80 attoseconds, this flash has already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse and could possibly be used in the future to capture the electron movement around large atoms.
Why?
My God, James Clerk Maxwell was right after all!
Can I get one of these flashguns for that? I'll show those ducks who the boss is!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Oh, you mean light particle, right?
This would be perfect to photograph the movement of electrons around Robert Mugabe's brain.
Using light to take pictures of light in motion?
This is either a hoax, or the the article is skipping some really important part.
I recall something about non-commuting observables that might make that electrons near atoms stuff suspect.
Because it's there. Well.. no... I mean it's "there", now. Oh. I mean by now it's all the way over there...
Dang! You know what I mean!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
a captured atom is an unhappy atom?
Wouldn't one of the hundreds of experiments that release and capture individual photons hold the record for fastest flash of light? What is the definition of "flash" in this context?
It is a hoax. see the picture of the light pulse? Well, for one, it's only showing a wave and we all know from physics that light is both a wave and and particle. So where's the particle? Hmmm?
Secondly, the wave is, well, wavy. And we know, again from physics, that light only travels in a straight line.
Those damn scientists always trying to fool us! And engineers too!
This is a pulse of a laser, not a continuous wave. The video in the article explains it better than I could.
He wanted a cool desktop background... BTW is there a link to a high resolution picture of that that would make a cool desktop background.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ok, Internet Physicists out there, please help me.
Ok, first you have this coherent photon beam. This means that they are all traveling at the same direction. So how do you take a picture of THAT?
You are bombarding the photon beam with photons, are the photons opaque, reflective, or TRANSPARENT? How do the photons from the flash, BOUNCE BACK at the camera. When they bounce back, how do you get color?
Is it just me, or does this make any sense at all?
Savior of the universe!
Do we care how short a flash of light can be created?
Can't you just illuminate something brightly for any length of time when taking a picture?
Isn't shutter speed the problem?
Someone educate me.
I have a flashlight that will shoot a beam out in 1 nottasecond. Also, imagine the stop-motion sports photos you could get with 80-attosecond film speed!
stuff |
I like the multimedia attached to the article:
Here's a thought. You have a coherent photon beam. This doesn't just mean they are all traveling in the same direction, this also means that they are perfectly in phase with one another. Probably better to think about it as a single wave with a large amplitude. Anyways, you shine another pulse of light at it, the light passes through the laser beam, and hits a detector. Perhaps they are measuring the interference between the laser light and the light pulse or some such. Not exactly a reflective picture in the common sense, but a picture none the less..
I hate to be a pedantic killjoy, but on that film the light flash lasted about 3 seconds. I could see it pretty well with my naked eye.
Try again, science!
Does anybody else see the problem here?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I am SO going to use this in a speech about my cousin's wedding night when we throw his stag next week. "Fast, you say? I'll tell you about fast..."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
... it'll still take Wallgreens an hour to develop the film.
Have gnu, will travel.
Attoboy!
Could hold onto it. And you know he is faster than light.
People have already produced sources that can release a single photon at a time. How short of a pulse would that be?
I suspect that when the article refers to the "shortest ever pulse", they're referring to a release/burst of many photons within a short time frame.
billionths of a billionth of a second I'm going out on a limb and saying a gazillionth second?
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
For some reason, this song popped into my head after reading this article.
Ah, sweet photons.... I don't know if you're waves or particles, but you sure do go down smooth.
There is now no more doubt that you can't beat those laser guns the cops use, if they upgrade to this baby.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
"and could possibly be used in the future to capture the electron movement around large atoms."
I like Einstein, never like the idea of superposition. The cat will die when factors cause it to die. It does not flip between dead and alive in a box.
But I suppose quantum theorists will say that by observing the location of the electron it is also changing it, that had it not been measured it'd be somewhere else, thus proving black is white.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
hmm, looking at the pic I would say they forgot the anti-shake setting
looks to me like one of those foam mattress pads with some wavy black fog of war photoshopped in
The shortest ever Flash of Light? How much spell haste did that paladin have to stack? - WoW geek
Actually this is theoretically possible. You can make two photons interact but it is not a first order effect and in fact is very heavily suppressed at low energies. So it is possible but incredibly unlikely (and certainly not how they did it here).
The video was a lot longer than I expected.
That is especially impossible!
An 80 attosecond pulse of light is about 29 nanometers wide. Google "The speed of light in nanometers per attosecond) and multiply that by 80.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
that I will finally be able to take a picture of a woman, talking on the phone to a friend, having her mouth _shut_? (provided that I dim the lights so the flash will do its work) Will 80 attoseconds be enough for this?
80 * the speed of light in nanometers per attoseconds
have a better explanation of the generation of high harmonics
http://www.atto.fysik.lth.se/
Articles like this make me want to quit my job and go back to studying physics and smoking pot.
Suddenly I'm getting hungry for a cheeseburger with jalapenos.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Don't know why I thought of it, but as soon as I saw the imaging I thought of Clive Barkers Weaveworld novel. Maybe magic isn't actually magic, and there are reasons, and scientific ones, that people have certain insight that others can't fathom. I definitely don't want to be one of those whack jobs that think the Earth is still flat, but things like this and string theory always keep me wondering if the guy down the street doing LSD and pulling down his pants all the time was really crazy or just had a different sense of perception.
...is that the photograph is taken before he presses the shutter. However, you can never know this for certain, as his finger now weighs an almost an infinite amount (albeit as an imaginary mass), which will result in the camera undergoing gravitational collapse into the finger.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Does this have any impact to the mainstream views of quantum mechanics?
Preachy, holier-than-thou, judgemental scumbags like you always have gigabytes of really disgusting pr0n stashed away someplace.
You're the kind of detestable loser who is arrested while he's at the neighborhood church and charged with raping his own children.
It wouldn't surprise me to see on your birth certificate that your middle name is 'Hypocrite'.
Not to be confused with a drive-by moon!
RR
Was it good for you too??
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
Say, how long were the shots from the pulse rifles in Star Wars? I'm sure that they were at least the first!
Be as you would have the world become.
I think you'll find Han shot first.
Is this a rhetorical question?
I hope you guys can forgive me on this, but it never occurred to me that they literally look like that. I always thought that the "waves" were too numerous and dense and the best way to describe it was to say they were waves. Thinking that was the layman's explanation and the actual scientific description was much more complicated.