The Nobel Physics Prize was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists for their work on attoseconds, which are almost unimaginably short periods of time.
The Nobel Physics Prize was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists for their work on attoseconds, which are almost unimaginably short periods of time.
Their work using lasers gives scientists a tool to observe and possibly even manipulate electrons, which could spur breakthroughs in fields such as electronics and chemistry, experts told AFP.
Attoseconds are a billionth of a billionth of a second.
To give a little perspective, there are around as many attoseconds in a single second as there have been seconds in the 13.8-billion year history of the universe.
Hans Jakob Woerner, a researcher at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, told AFP that attoseconds are “the shortest timescales we can measure directly”.
Being able to operate on this timescale is important because these are the speeds at which electrons—key parts of an atom—operate.
For example, it takes electrons 150 attoseconds to go around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.
This means the study of attoseconds has given scientists access to a fundamental process that was previously out of reach.
All electronics are mediated by the motion of electrons—and the current “speed limit” is nanoseconds, Woerner said.
