Making Electron Movies with an Attosecond Laser After splitting and then recombining two laser beams from the same origin, the resulting beam would be passed through a gas medium that further intensifies the beam’s frequency. Shu-Wei Huang/MIT News
An international team of researchers spanning Australia, North America, and Europe has created a model for a new kind of attosecond laser that should be able to film individual electrons as they participate in chemical reactions. Such high-res, high-speed data gathering has never been achieved before, and if successful the new laser system could have implications for everything from basic chemistry to complex pharmaceutical research and chemical engineering.
Capturing electrons on “film” isn’t easy–imagine the shutter speed you would need to capture something moving so fast that it can rotate a central hub in 151 billionths of a billionth of a second. That’s how fast the electron orbiting a hydrogen nucleus is moving, so in order to capture it in the act you need something with attosecond resolution. In other words, you need a laser capable of pulsing at the attosecond scale. More
