“Physicists who built ultrafast ‘attosecond’ lasers win Nobel Prize”

[julianthedragon]

Physicists who built ultrafast ‘attosecond’ lasers win Nobel Prize

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier receive award for ultra-short pulses of light, which have enabled the close study of electrons.

www.nature.com

 

[Ears and Eggs]

Damn. Attosecond. O___O

Imagine flying down the interstate at 200 miles per attosecond on a huge, antimatter powered, Harley cruiser when you hit a warthog and disintegrate. O_____O.

 

[RedCowboy]

NOPE ! That would be way faster than the speed of light.

From the web:
At one-quintillionth of a second, an attosecond is unimaginably fast. In 53 attoseconds, light travels less than one-thousandth of the diameter of a human hair.

A quintillionth is one billionth of one billionth, so an attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second.

A human hair is 90,000 nanometers wide ( average ), so in 53 attoseconds light travels 90 nanometers.

So light travels 1.7 nanometers in an attosecond, that's less than one wave of any visible light IINM.

From the web:
For attosecond pulses, the principal technical problem is bandwidth. Since light travels only three angstroms per attosecond, an attosecond pulse is more than a thousand times shorter than even a single cycle of visible radiation, so its bandwidth must be more than a thousand times greater.

So they are working with X-ray lasers ?
X-rays have wavelengths ranging from 0.01 to 10 nanometers