At the University of Arizona, in Tucson, it was built a laser microscope, that can capture images in an attosecond.
An attosecond equals to 1\cdot 10^{-18} second or 1 quintillionth of a second.
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Source: ScienceNews
The technique was called “attomicroscopy”, it can capture the zippy motion of electrons inside a molecule with much greater precision than previously possible, physicist Mohammed Hassan and colleagues report August 21 in Science Advances.
The attomicroscope is a modified transmission electron microscope, which uses a beam of electrons to image things as small as a few nanometers across. Like light, electrons can be thought of as waves. These wavelengths, though, are much smaller than those of light. That means an electron beam has a higher resolution than a conventional laser and can detect smaller things, like atoms or clouds of other electrons.
To get their superfast images, Hassan and colleagues used a laser to chop the electron beam into ultrashort pulses. Like the shutter on a camera, those pulses allowed them to capture a new image of the electrons in a sheet of graphene every 625 attoseconds — roughly a thousand times as fast as existing techniques.
The microscope can’t capture images of a single electron yet — that would require extremely high spatial resolution. But by stringing the collected images together, scientists created a kind of stop-motion movie that shows how a collection of electrons move through a molecule.
The technique could let researchers watch how a chemical reaction occurs or probe how electrons move through DNA, Hassan says. That information could help scientists craft new materials or personalized medicines.
