A team of physicists clocked the time it takes electrons to leave a dielectric after their generation with extreme ultraviolet light. The measurement (false color plot) was the first of its kind in a dielectric material and yielded a time of 150 attoseconds (as), from which the physicists determined that inelastic scattering in the dielectric takes about 370 as. (Dennis Luck, Thorsten Naeser/LMU)
An international team of physicists has monitored the scattering behavior of electrons in a non-conducting material in real-time. Their insights could be beneficial for radiotherapy. We can refer to electrons in non-conducting materials as 'sluggish'. Typically, they remain fixed in a location, deep inside an atomic composite. It is hence relatively still in a dielectric crystal lattice. This idyll has now been heavily shaken up by a team of physicists led by Matthias Kling , the leader of the Ultrafast Nanophotonics group in the Department of Physics at LMU, and various research institutions, including the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies (IFN-CNR) in Milan, the Institute of Physics at the University of Rostock, the Max Born Institute (MBI), the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) and the University of Hamburg. For the first time, these researchers managed to directly observe the interaction of light and electrons in a dielectric, a non-conducting material, on timescales of attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second).
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