Birgitta Bernhardt measuring at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Munich. (Photo: Michael Mittermair / TUM)
Research news - Many chemical processes run so fast that they are only roughly understood. To clarify these processes, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed a methodology with a resolution of quintillionths of a second. The new technology stands to help better understand processes like photosynthesis and develop faster computer chips. An important intermediary step in many chemical processes is ionization. A typical example of this is photosynthesis. The reactions take only a few femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) or even merely a few hundred attoseconds (quintillionths of a second). Because they run so extremely fast, only the initial and final products are known, but not the reaction paths or the intermediate products.
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