Scientists want to image atomic processes occurring in real time, which requires extremely short pulses of light. Current state-of-the-art lasers can take attosecond (10−18 second) snapshots, but Andreas Ipp, Christoph Keitel and Jörg Evers at the Max Plank Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, think that they can do a million times better using heavy-ion collisions.
When nuclei such as those of lead or gold collide, the quarks inside protons and neutrons briefly become free to move on their own. Over the course of a few yoctoseconds (10−24 second) they expand, releasing a super-short pulse of light. Only a few yoctosecond-long photons would be released by even the highest-energy collisions, but on the basis of their calculations, the authors believe that under the right conditions, the pulses could be used for ultrafast imaging.
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Physics: Holy yocto!. Nature 461, 850 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461850c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/461850c