World's Shortest Laser Pulse Created; Could Let Us See Electrons Move Inside Atoms

Watching electrons move inside atoms is every electronics engineer's dream that might soon come true. Thanks to the efforts of the researchers from University of Central Florida, who have created the world’s shortest laser pulse that lasted for 67-attoseconds. And oh boy, one attosecond is a quintillionith of a second! UCF's very own Professor Zenghu Chang from the Department of Physics and the College of Optics and Photonics, who led the research team shared how they successfully created an attosecond pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. Why this work is remarkable you ask? Well, the equipment they used to generate this laser pulse wasn't much specialized. And if you do the math, you will find that it takes 15 million billion such pulses to equal one second.
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The quest for generating shorter and shorter laser pulses has been going on around for decades. It is astounding to imagine that scientists will now be able to watch physics at microscopic level and see how quantum mechanics works at the minutest scale. This technique when developed further could lead scientists to understand how energy can be harnessed to transport data, deliver targeted cancer therapies or diagnose disease. We look forward to the day when we see the basic building blocks of our nature in motion, do you?
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