High-speed videos of nuclear reactions with frames lasting less than one-billionth of one-billionth of a second may eventually be possible, owing to a theoretical scheme for making ultrashort laser pulses.
Longer pulses of light lasting several attoseconds (10−18 seconds) are already used to capture high-resolution films of atomic and electronic processes. The pulses are typically generated from X-rays that are emitted when electrons are scattered by infrared lasers and then recombine with parent atoms.
Carlos Hernández-García of the University of Colorado Boulder and his colleagues suggest an even more sensitive technique that involves measuring the interference pattern between X-ray pulses emitted from electrons that have been scattered and recombined multiple times, potentially generating pulses that last only hundreds of zeptoseconds (1 zeptosecond is 10−21 seconds). Such a timescale could be used to image subatomic processes.
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Images on a subatomic scale. Nature 500, 9 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/500009b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/500009b