World's fastest microscope freezes time at 1 attosecond

Amazing stuff!

"... previous efforts to capture events on that kind of timescale have gotten it down as far as 43 attoseconds, which the researchers at the time called “the shortest controlled event ever created by humankind.” And now, the U[niversity] of A[rizona] team has gone even shorter, freezing time at just one attosecond. ...
For the new study, the researchers developed what they call an “attomicroscope.” First, a pulse of ultraviolet light is fired off into a photocathode, which releases ultra-fast electrons inside the attomicroscope. Then, a laser pulse is split into two beams, which are both sent into the electrons moving through the microscope. One of those beams is polarized, and they arrive at slightly different times, generating a “gated” electron pulse that can image a sample – in this case, graphene. ..."

"Imagine owning a camera so powerful it can take freeze-frame photographs of a moving electron – an object traveling so fast it could circle the Earth many times in a second. Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed the world's fastest electron microscope that can do just that. ..."

From the abstract:

"Advances in attosecond spectroscopy have enabled tracing and controlling the electron motion dynamics in matter, although they have yielded insufficient information about the electron dynamic in the space domain. Hence, ultrafast electron and x-ray imaging tools have been developed to image the ultrafast dynamics of matter in real time and space. The cutting-edge temporal resolution of these imaging tools is on the order of a few tens to a hundred femtoseconds, limiting imaging to the atomic dynamics and leaving electron motion imaging out of reach. Here, we obtained the attosecond temporal resolution in the transmission electron microscope, which we coined “attomicroscopy.” We demonstrated this resolution by the attosecond diffraction measurements of the field-driven electron dynamics in graphene. This attosecond imaging tool would provide more insights into electron motion and directly connect it to the structural dynamics of matter in real-time and space domains, opening the door for long-anticipated real-life attosecond science applications in quantum physics, chemistry, and biology."

World's fastest microscope freezes time at 1 quintillionth of a second

Freeze-frame: U of A researchers develop microscope that can see electrons in motion (original news release)

Attosecond electron microscopy and diffraction (open access)

Fig. 1. Attosecond electron microscope setup.