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Florida Researchers Create Shortest Light Pulse Ever Recorded
SchrodingerZ writes "Researchers at the University of Central Florida have created the shortest laser pulse ever recorded, lasting only 67 attoseconds. An attosecond is a mere quintillionith of a single second (1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000). The record-breaking project was run by UCF Professor Zenghu Chang, using an extreme ultraviolet laser pulse. '"Dr. Chang's success in making ever-shorter light pulses helps open a new door to a previously hidden world, where we can watch electrons move in atoms and molecules, and follow chemical reactions as they take place," said Michael Johnson, the dean of the UCF College of Sciences and a physicist.' Its hoped that these short laser blasts will pave the way to better understand quantum mechanics in ways we have never before witnessed. In 2008 the previous record was set at 80 attoseconds, the pulse created at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany."
Can't we get a video?
To put that in perspective, light in a vacuum travels around 20 nm in 67 attoseconds, so the width of the pulse is about the same as the width of the smallest virus or about 1/350th the 7um diameter of a human blood cell.
Now lets see what these little buggers look like in their own respective slow motion. Careful not to give the quarks any seizures.
longer than my attention span
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You can work out the length of the beam this would produce using Wolfram Alpha. Enter the query:
speed of light in a vacuum * 67 attoseconds
and you get the result: 20 nanometres. Interestingly, that's about the same size as current chip fabrication technology.
How do you even measure something of such short duration? Is it an interpolated result?
I can create a laser pulse lasting ZERO attoseconds. There, just did it. There, just did it again. Top *that*, UCF!
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Can anyone explain how they accurately measure time spans this small? Or did they not measure at all, and instead calculate what it should be from other parameters?
Three New York Taxis and two bike couriers can get through the intersection during the duration of that light.
A word to the wise when trying to get people excited about fundmental science: the number "1" followed by a lot of zeroes is meaningless to most people (even scientists). Please give us something to relate that number to and put it in scientific notation!
67 attoseconds = 6.7 x 10^–18 seconds
As a photochemist, I know that a femtosecond is (1 x 10^–15 seconds) is the on order of many "fast" chemical reactions, like visible light reacting with your eye, so attoseconds are faster than most chemical bonds breaking/forming.
Would stuff like this benefit fiber networking by any chance? A lot more pulses in a much shorter time frame would boost bit transfers would it not?
A word to the wise when trying to get people excited about fundmental science: the number "1" followed by a lot of zeroes is meaningless to most people (even scientists). Please give us something to relate that number to and put it in scientific notation!
They did give a unit that scientists can relate to when they said "67 attoseconds". The 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 notation is just there for the layman for whom scientific notation means nothing, 1 x 10^-18 means little to most people, but lots of zeros make it clear that it's a very small number.
67 attoseconds = 6.7 x 10^–18 seconds
You're off by 10 -- 67 attoseconds = 67 x 10^-18, or 6.7 x 10^-17
You're off by a factor of 10 -- 67 attoseconds = 67 x 10^-18, or 6.7 x 10^-17
I'll get my coat.
Now maybe we can get a picture of the fastest thing in the world, that drop of water that shoots up your butt when you take a good dump.
Great job
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
where we can see God rolling the dice, he might be very impressed and lets us back into the Garden.
Oh I mean can you send and receive data? Say over fiber optic at speeds like this? How about data over a lazar to (where?) say mars?
I have no problems with basic science, Great science Guys. I am just wondering what is next? the Lab (FAST) is the Florida Atto Science & Technology (FAST). So the tech part is next.
Even more impressive is that UV radiation is the spectrum from 10 nm to 400 nm, with extreme UV down the 10nm end. So this at most 2 wavelengths.* It barely gets waving.
* TFA didn't have wavelength data.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
How can they speculate about the color of the source (ultra-violet) when a single complete cycle of a wave of that color is 300-400nm long, and the pulse generated here was only 20 nm long?
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
As a photochemist, I know that a femtosecond [...] is the on order of many "fast" chemical reactions
In what sense is that? I would imagine that ultimately chemical reactions are instantaneous, that is, quantum state changes.
Similarly, I don't understand the summary's talk about watching electrons move within atoms. AFAIK, electrons don't move on their orbitals but are stationary until they participate in an interaction.
Bah. You got me on 6.7 x 10^-17 sec.
My gripe is the OP's frame of reference: "an attosecond is 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds". That would be like telling me that the Pacific Ocean holds 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 teaspoons of water. That value and that unit should never go together. Lots of zeroes (big or small) is mind-boggling for a layperson or scientist, especially since OP did not give any frame of reference like, "1000 times faster than your eyes turn light into images". It's not a perfect comparison, but it certainly sounds really really fast. (Granted, I should have converted it to furlongs per fortnight.)
The number is what it is. Sorry if it's not trivial to comprehend the number. That's not the writer/speaker's job. It's the reader/listener's job. It's a fair amount of work to do so, but really not that much. It's character building. I doubt if the brain has to spend more than a tiny fraction of a teaspoon of glucose and maybe a few thimblefuls of oxygen to work out a way to visualize it.
If someone isn't going to understand attoseconds then he can understand that its mindbogglingly short. That's where the 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 comes in. If you can understand attoseconds it seems useless information.
You seem to be in a third group: you can't understand attoseconds, but the 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 is to layman-ish for you. You complain because you cannot understand that someone would neither understand attoseconds nor 6.7x10^-17 (of which there are many).
Now I do agree with complains about only displaying the 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 , for that would skip the useful information for scientificly minded people, but that is not an issue here. Attoseconds are used, which are the scientific name.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
"we can watch electrons move" - I thought quantum dynamics, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in particular, prohibits things like that? After all, watching something move essentially means you are able to measure both it's position and velocity?
Yes, nothing says "meaningful to most people" like some good old scientific notation... Do you get that 60% of the US doesn't have a college degree, much less multiple degrees, mr. smartass?
I think for most people who don't get 1 x 10^-18, 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 looks like a really _big_ number because they are too clueless to notice the 1/ bit, or really internalize what it means.