Taking picture in atto second? Yes we did.

[eha]

Hello everybody!
I wonder what is the latest developments in nano level photography. It was about four years ago when I heard picture were taken in atto second. It was a great achievment for mankind. It was like a challenge to catch speed of light. Did we go further down to zepto(10^-21m) level yet since then? Where can I follow those studies from?
Thanks in advance for helpful information.

 

[Astronuc]

Where did one here are pictures in 1 attosecond (10⁻¹⁸ s)? That is meaningless, especially in the macroscoping world. Took pictures with what - photons?

In 1 atto-second a photon traves 3 x 10^-8 cm, or 3 Angstroms. Hardly enough time to leave the vicinity of an atom.

Zeptometer? We're lucky to image a plane of atoms - atomic force microprobe.

http://www.nanoworld.com/

http://nano.tm.agilent.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=253&sec=pd&s_kwcid=TC|6885|atomic%20force||S|p|2923842796&gclid=CLiB6_Cb654CFZAN5Qod9mYjZw

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992SPIE.1556...79N

 

[eha]

Hello Astronuc,
I didn't have time to get back to you, sorry about that.
If I say "Activities have been measured in an atto second" Does it make sense?
I read this topic in a scientific article about 4 years ago. They had given an example to better understand what have they done. Of course they are going to measure or take picture of sub atomic particles. Can't we technically measure the movement of photon within 3 Angstrom distance? Or pick another subatomic particle if photon isn't suitable. They say they did, and they give this example to better understood by average people. Let's say we have a spaceship, we measure this spaceship's speed and it is 0.45 cm/atto s. In femto second it goes 4.5 m, in pico second it goes 4.5 km, in nano second it goes 4500 km. In a whole second this spaceship would go and come back a half billion times between LA and New York(4500km). Because with this speed our spaceship goes 15 million times faster than speed of light. Our ship would turn around sun in Earth's orbit nearly 5000 times in a second. If it goes around the sun in Pluto's orbit it makes about 237 circles in a second. So we are able to measure or observe a half cm movement of this much fast spaceship.

 

[PTM19]

I guess what you are talking about eha is probably some kind of an experiment using ultrashort laser pulses. It's not really taking "pictures in an attosecond," attosecond is probably the time between pulses and therefore between consecutive frames but capturing each frame has to take longer for the reasons stated above.

As for following the research I can only advise you to try googling "ultrashort (or ultrafast) laser pulses" since I don't follow it myself.

 

[Cthugha]

Experiments using pulses with attosecond duration are usually used to resolve things happening at the electronic scale. If you want to see time resolved electron tunneling, the emission of an electron caused by the absorption of a UV-photon and the breaking of chemical bonds happen on this timescale. However, the techniques used here are more difficult than taking pictures and consist of extreme pump-probe-techniques or similar techniques.

See for example:

Attosecond Photoelectron Spectroscopy of Metal Surfaces (Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 123601 (2009))
Attosecond real-time observation of electron tunnelling in atoms (Nature 446, 627-632 (5 April 2007))
Attosecond control of electronic processes by intense light fields (Nature 421, 611–615 (2003))
Attosecond streak camera (Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 173903 (2002))

or have a look at the page of the group of Ferenc Krausz at the MPI in Garching. http://www.attoworld.de/

 

[eha]

Thank you guys, I have reached plenty of resources about attosecond.

 

[eha]

Hey man look what I have found!
Andreas Ipp and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics calculate that yoctosecond light pulses can be produced. And they did it just 2 months ago in October, 2009. The creation of attosecond-scale light pulses is an astounding feat, and opens up whole new areas in advance spectroscopy. But what if we could jump from atto, right pass zepto, all the way to yocto?
Yoctosecond(10^-24s) scale pulses would enable the light-based investigation of structures the size of atomic nuclei. Can be found more articles thru Google and Yoctosecond.
Yesterday our spaceship was going at the speed of nearly a half light year a second, today it goes even a million times faster. So we can imagine that our ship would go from Earth to Andromeda Galaxy in just 5 seconds. Makes me feel good to think this way.

 

[Cthugha]

Yes, I read that paper. It was somewhere in PRL this year. But it was just a theoretical prediction of how quark-gluon plasmas should behave. Although they claim that at some time there will be a preferred direction of emission, I doubt that there will be a deterministic way to have deterministic controlled emission of light pulses by thoses plasmas any time soon. Additionally those pulse carry extremely high energy and are pretty broad spectrally.