For the first time ever, laser physicists have recorded an internal atomic event with an accuracy of a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
When light strikes electrons in atoms, their states can change unimaginably quickly. Laser physicists at LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have now measured the duration of such a phenomenon – namely that of photoionization, in which an electron exits a helium atom after excitation by light – for the first time with zeptosecond precision. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a a second (10-21 s). ...
