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Atomic forces mapped out by lasers

The forces between electrons and nuclei in solids are difficult to image directly. A study shows that these forces can instead be indirectly imaged using the light emitted when the electrons are subjected to a strong laser field.
  1. Michael A. Sentef

    1. Michael A. Sentef is at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, 22761 Hamburg, Germany and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.

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One of the central goals of physics is to gain a detailed understanding of nature’s building blocks and the mutual forces between them. In materials, such building blocks are atomic nuclei and the electrons that zip around between these nuclei, with forces acting on atomic length scales. Direct imaging of such forces using light is notoriously difficult and typically requires X-ray wavelengths. However, in a paper in Nature, Lakhotia et al.1 demonstrate that indirect imaging is possible using visible light, even though the wavelengths of this light are about 10,000 times larger than atomic scales.

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Nature 583, 35-36 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01913-5

References

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