World-Record Laser Blast Lasts 67 Quintillionths of a Second

Scientists have generated the world fastest laser pulse, a beam that shoots for 67 attoseconds, or 0.000000000000000067 seconds.

Scientists have generated the world's fastest laser pulse, a beam that shoots for 67 attoseconds, or 0.000000000000000067 seconds. The feat improves on the previous record of 80 attoseconds, set in 2008, by 13 quintillionths of a second.

The technique could help engineers see extremely rapid quantum mechanical processes, such as the movements of electrons during chemical reactions.

"While one can take snap shot images of a flying bullet with microsecond light pulses, now scientists study electron motions with attosecond pulses," physicist Zenghu Chang of the University of Central Florida wrote in an e-mail to Wired.

To achieve their record-setting blast, the researchers sent pulses from a titanium-sapphire near-infrared laser through a system known as double optical gating, or DOG. This gate concentrates the energy of extreme ultraviolet light pulses and focuses them on a cell filled with neon gas.

Because the pressure of the gas controls the pulse duration, the team thinks they can eventually achieve much shorter laser shots, down to 25 attoseconds. At such timescales, previously hidden processes in the subatomic world would be illuminated with higher resolution than ever before.

Most sciences have a long history of funny acronyms and it seems that the ultrashort laser pulse community is not immune. In their research paper, published in Optics Letters, the team said that they searched for superfast shots in their data using two algorithms named “phase retrieval by omega oscillation filtering” (PROOF) and “frequency-resolved optical gating for complete reconstruction of attosecond bursts” (FROG-CRAB), leading to this interesting sentence:

“In conclusion, a 67 attosecond XUV pulse, the shortest isolated attosecond pulse to the best of our knowledge, was generated with DOG and fully characterized by PROOF and FROG-CRAB.”

Images: 1*) Flickr/dmuth 2) Physicist Zenghu Chang, whose team produced the world-record laser pulse. University of Central Florida.*