Scientists at the University of Konstanz create one of the shortest signals ever created by man: by using an integrated laser beam, they managed to collect the sequence of electrons in a scan time of only 0.000000000000000005 seconds, A trillionth of a second.
Natural processes that occur in particles or solids sometimes occur on the scale of quadrillionths (femtoseconds) or quintillionths (attoseconds) of a second. Nuclear reactions are even faster.
Now, Maxim Tsarev, Johannes Thurner and Peter Baum, scientists from the University of Konstanz, are using new experimental devices to obtain signals of attosecond time, i.e. billionths of nanoseconds, which opens up new ideas in the field of ultrafast phenomena.
Even light waves cannot reach such a time, because one oscillation takes a long time for that. Electrons provide a cure here, because they allow high time resolution. In their experimental set-up, the Constance researchers use a pair of femtosecond pulses from a laser to create their short electron pulses in free space.
The results are published in the journal Nature Physics.
How did scientists do it?
Similar to tidal waves, thermal waves can also accumulate to form crests and troughs of standing or traveling waves. Scientists have chosen the part of the event and the frequency as the electrons propagate, which fly in space at half the speed of light, fall into the crests and troughs of optical waves with the same speed.
This is called the ponderomotive force and pushes the electrons in the direction of the next liquid. Therefore, after a short discussion, an electronic plant system is created that is very short in time – especially in the middle of the train, where the electricity is strong.
For short periods, the duration of the electron pulses is only about five minutes. To understand this process, researchers consider the speed distribution of electrons that remain after compression.
“Instead of the rapidity of seed production, you see a wider distribution that results from the reduction or acceleration of some electrons during compression,” says scientist Johannes Thurner. “But it’s not just that: the distribution is not constant. Instead, it has thousands of speed steps, since only a binary number of light rays can interact with electrons at the same time.
The need for research
In quantum mechanics, say scientists, it is a temporal superposition (interference) of electrons and themselves, when the same acceleration is done at different times. This effect is important for quantum mechanical experiments – for example, in the interaction of electrons with light.
What is also significant: the plane electromagnetic waves like light cannot usually cause a permanent change in the speed of electrons and vacuum, because the total energy and energy of a large electron and a luminous particle of zero mass at rest (photon) cannot be conserved.
However, having two photons at the same time in a wave that is slower than the speed of light solves this problem (Kapitza-Dirac effect). For Peter Baum, professor of physics and head of the Light and Matter Group at the University of Konstanz, these results are still very basic research, but they show great potential for future research.
“If two people in short we affect things. pulses at different times change, the first brain can trigger changes, the second can be used for observation – similar to the light of the camera pattern and everything that happens in the empty space.
Lasers of any power can be used as a standard in the future for when energy compression. “Our new two-photon detector allows us to get into a new phase and possibly even a nuclear reaction,” Baum says.
Source: University of Konstanz
