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."

Comments

How do they measure this?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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?

Re:How do they measure this?

[The Master Control P]

A monochromatic wave, having zero extent in momentum space, has infinite extent in realspace.

A laser pulse whose duration is comparable to a single wave period as those in TFA are will in fact have a very broad energy spectrum, which can be understood both through time-energy uncertainty and by noting that a pulse waveform has a broad fourier spectrum, corresponding to broad energy distribution.

I end up saying or at least thinking this every time a science-breakthrough article comes by on Slashdot: If you think whatever someone did in cutting-edge experimental science is "easy," it's because you don't understand what they did and/or the theory behind it. Think before you speak: If it were actually easy, wouldn't they have already done it this way? Posting a "dumb scientists, that was easy" comment will bring only embarassment.

1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000. What does that mean?

[tim_darklighter]

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.

Re:The width of a virus

[Calydor]

Another good comparison relating to how far light travels in that span of time is that it would take TWO of these pulses to cross one 'section' of a 45nm CPU; some of the smallest we currently have in consumer desktops.