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Fastest-Ever Flashgun Captures Image of Light Wave

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fastest-flash-in-the-west dept.

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.

45 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Who woulda thought? by rumblin'rabbit · · Score: 4, Funny

    My God, James Clerk Maxwell was right after all!

    1. Re:Who woulda thought? by vivin · · Score: 5, Funny

      Light is a wave and a particle and therefore, a "wavicle".

      --
      Vivin Suresh Paliath
      http://vivin.net

      I like
    2. Re:Who woulda thought? by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Funny

      My God, James Clerk Maxwell You crazy Slashdotters and your false idols! :-)
      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    3. Re:Who woulda thought? by PunkOfLinux · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ergo, test particles are "testicles"?

      --
      Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
    4. Re:Who woulda thought? by SQLGuru · · Score: 3, Funny

      You may not use mine for testing.....unless it's the latest adult gadget and the researchers are hot women.

      Layne

    5. Re:Who woulda thought? by BotnetZombie · · Score: 2, Funny

      Does this mean that I should call the fabric of my tent - tentacles?

    6. Re:Who woulda thought? by CroDragn · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wrong, by classical double slit experiment. Single photons are fired at two slits, yet still create the double interference pattern that can only be explained by it going to through both slits as a wave would.

    7. Re:Who woulda thought? by Richy_T · · Score: 2, Funny

      Particles of umpredicatability: whimsicles

    8. Re:Who woulda thought? by negRo_slim · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I prefer 'warticle' or a 'parve'. Fits in nicely with quark if I do say so myself.

      --
      On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
    9. Re:Who woulda thought? by turgid · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ergo, test particles are "testicles"?

      No, he was a famous ancient Greek philosopher.

      --
      Stick Men
    10. Re:Who woulda thought? by Supergibbs · · Score: 2, Funny

      I prefer 'warticle' or a 'parve'. Ooooh it's kosher?
      --
      First post! (just in case I am...)
    11. Re:Who woulda thought? by taupin · · Score: 2, Informative

      What? The page wasn't taken down. . . it's just that the linky is wrong. Try here

    12. Re:Who woulda thought? by bugnuts · · Score: 4, Funny

      Would that be the famous double-slit experiment?

    13. Re:Who woulda thought? by CroDragn · · Score: 3, Informative

      I assume you mean to use this method to determine which slit the photon passes through, which works. Sorta. Determining which slit the photon passes through can be done (not sure if by this method, but it's been done in the past), but when done all of a sudden the interference pattern vanishes. This is the source of the quantum observation effect you may have heard about.

    14. Re:Who woulda thought? by cool_arrow · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought tentacles was a greek god. Ever hear of popsicles - the greek god of frozen confections?

  2. Duckhunt by AioKits · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Duckhunt by andrewd18 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Newsline Saturday: Hundreds of mallard ducks found dead outside residential area; experts believe death caused by epileptic seizures.

    2. Re:Duckhunt by PawNtheSandman · · Score: 5, Funny

      What's the difference between you and a mallard with a cold?

      One's a sick duck and... I can't remember how it ends, but your mother's a whore.

    3. Re:Duckhunt by Drakonik · · Score: 3, Funny

      My girlfriend tells a joke about ducks. It goes:

      "What's the difference between a grape and a duck?"
      Answer: "Both are purple, except for the duck."

      Yeah, it's stupid, but I laugh, and then she has sex with me.

    4. Re:Duckhunt by gardyloo · · Score: 5, Funny

      At which point she laughs?

    5. Re:Duckhunt by dotancohen · · Score: 4, Funny

      My girlfriend tells a joke about ducks. It goes:

      "What's the difference between a grape and a duck?"
      Answer: "Both are purple, except for the duck."

      Yeah, it's stupid, but I laugh, and then she has sex with me.

      Tell her I laughed. How far does she live from Nesher?
      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    6. Re:Duckhunt by silentcoder · · Score: 3, Funny

      Discussing your sex life on /. is such an effective proof of virginity the Silver Ring club now uses it to evaluate membership applications !

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  3. Sounds impossible by Carewolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Using light to take pictures of light in motion?

    This is either a hoax, or the the article is skipping some really important part.

    1. Re:Sounds impossible by bugnuts · · Score: 5, Interesting

      from TFA, I believe it's imaging a laser pulse shot through neon gas. It's the laser pulse that triggered the flash in the first place.

      Bizarrely, the article states

      As each flash is intense enough to completely ionise a neon atom and release an electron, the researchers could use those electrons like a flashgun, to illuminate some of the original 2.5 femtosecond trigger pulses of laser light. This is interesting, because the neon is releasing electrons, not photons.

      I agree that snapping a photo of light sounds dubious, but it looks like an electron flash, so maybe it's just making something visible that wouldn't have been seen otherwise.

    2. Re:Sounds impossible by theun4gven · · Score: 2, Informative

      I agree that snapping a photo of light sounds dubious, but it looks like an electron flash, so maybe it's just making something visible that wouldn't have been seen otherwise. All photos are photos of light.
  4. Re:Taking a picture of a laser beam and using flas by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

    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..."
  5. Yep, it's hoax. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Yep, it's hoax. by SQLGuru · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dude, it's camera shake......they should have used a tripod.

      Layne

  6. Re:Taking a picture of a laser beam and using flas by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  7. Um... What? by barfy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Um... What? by Benbrizzi · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's not what happens. You only see a laser because the photons reflect off particles (neon in this case). The photons which hit your camera all come from (almost) parallel lines so what you see is where the photons hit by your beam were.

    2. Re:Um... What? by Btarlinian · · Score: 4, Informative

      From the article it sounds like a pump-probe experiment. They excite the neon with a 2.5 femtosecond pulse and then image the excited state with a 80 attosecond pulse. (You obviously need the imaging pulse to be shorter than the excitation pulse.) I'm not sure how much detail you would be able to get from this though, as the wavelength and brightness of the light source would be a limiting factor.

    3. Re:Um... What? by againjj · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

      In a different way that a standard photograph.

      You are bombarding the photon beam with photons,

      No, you aren't. That doesn't make sense.

      What they do is have the laser pulse travel through something they call a "chirped mirror". This packs the photos from the laser pulse into a smaller space. This then travels through a neon cloud, which then creates a flash of light. This flash of light is the "shortest-ever flash of light".

      To photograph this flash of light, they direct it into a second neon cloud, which ionizes atoms, releasing electrons. Those electrons are then recorded. Multiple flashes were required to produce enough electrons to build up the image shown in the article, so what you really have is an image of many flashes overlaid.

    4. Re:Um... What? by barfy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thanks, but I think there is something I have hopelessly never figured out, and that something would also let me understand how reflection works. How does an atom know the direction that the photon was traveling and and what does it bump off of? And isn't the atom round, so how come reflection works like the atoms are a plane. And how does the atom know the relative position of the atoms around it, so that it can reflect the photon in the right direction?

      This is also the problem with lenses. How does the atom know the surface of the greater object, so that it knows what directions to send the photons that are passing through?

      I am sure if I understood this, it would make the underlying question here easier. But as many of these answers so far show, this is be far, not a trivial question.

    5. Re:Um... What? by TigerNut · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Richard Feynman once pondered, if moisture molecules in the atmosphere scatter light, and presumably this is a random effect because the molecules are randomly distributed, why is it that buildings, etc. when they're viewed through mist, do they still have sharp edges? You'd think all the random scatter would blur the edges.

      That thought train led him to do some fundamental work in particle scattering and path integrals, IIRC, and eventually to the Feynman diagrams that are now commonly used to describe some aspects of particle interactions.

      So you're thinking some good deep thoughts there, but I can't give you a good answer other than "they just know". Basically the "proper" reflection is the only one that is coherent to the observer and the other reflected beams are all out of phase so they might as well not happen... and therefore they don't. Or something like that.

      --

      Less is more.

    6. Re:Um... What? by Anpheus · · Score: 3, Funny

      God dammit, now what's the answer? Why are the building edges sharp?

      Feynman would never have left me hanging like that.

    7. Re:Um... What? by BlackLungPop · · Score: 4, Informative

      Check out the book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman. The answer is basically that the photon doesn't bounce off of anything! It "interacts" with an electron, and another photon is emitted. Why is it emitted at the particular angle? That's what the book is all about. Way too much to explain here. But if you want to understand in layman's terms how reflection and refraction work, and why glass is transparent, get that book, it's wonderful.

  8. FLASH! Ahhhhh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Savior of the universe!

  9. Re:What about shutter speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, shutters are used to limit the ambient light from reaching the film (or sensor). In a situation like this you are limiting the light being produced. So no shutter is needed - just leave the film exposed for the whole experement, when the light is produced it will be recorded (you record the rest of it too, but it records as nothing).

  10. Ummm.. by InlawBiker · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  11. Electron movement? by Thelasko · · Score: 2, Funny

    Jonathan Marangos at Imperial College London, UK, says the super-short flashes could let researchers image the movement of electrons around large atoms. So, you take a picture of it. Now you know where it is. But how fast is it going?

    Does anybody else see the problem here?
    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  12. Re:What about shutter speed? by egomaniac · · Score: 5, Informative

    Consider a 35mm film camera with a mechanical shutter... what degree of force and mechanism would be required to move that shutter to open AND close the height of 24mm in 80 attoseconds? IANAPhysicist, but I doubt human hands could hang on to it.

    Apparently we're not realizing just how short 80 attoseconds is. You doubt human hands could hang on to it? Moving 24mm in 80 attoseconds is faster than the speed of light. Not only is it faster than the speed of light, it's a million times faster than the speed of light.

    Light only travels 24 nanometers in 80 attoseconds.

    --
    ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
  13. Re:What about shutter speed? by n6kuy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Film?

    What's that?

    --
    If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
  14. Re:But... by mikael · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Look at ocean waves travelling along the coast line. While a wave can be said to have energy through the momentum of water, there is no actual wave particle itself, just the interaction of all the water molecules interacting together, along with gravity to keep everything together.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  15. Re:What about shutter speed? by kjots · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your safe search is off, which triggers my URL filtering to block google. It's a great way to catch people who hang out on the seedier side of google images.

    Or people who don't like to have their search results artificially curtailed by someone else's sense of unreasonable morality.