They produced a signal a mind-bending short 53 billionths of a second.
Shorter pulses of electrons allow a higher rate of data transmission. Eleftherios Goulielmakis and colleagues at the University of Rostock in Germany have been working on reducing the length of these pulses as much as possible, with a view to helping improve computing applications as well as electron microscopes.
In ordinary circuits, pulses of electrons are limited by the frequency at which electrons can oscillate inside matter. According to Goulielmakis, a pulse should last at least half a cycle of these oscillations due to the fact that it is the cycle creates a "pushing force" for electrons. Light, meanwhile, oscillates at a much higher frequency, which led Goulielmakis and his team to use a short burst of light to trigger a pulse of electrons.
Using this technique in 2016, the scientists created a flash of visible light lasting only 380 attoseconds. Now, they have gone a step further and used lasers to knock electrons off the tip of a tungsten needle and into a vacuum. Using this method, they recorded a 53-attosecond pulse of electrons. According to Goulielmakis, this is a fifth of the time it would take an electron to orbit its nucleus in a hydrogen atom.
Goulielmakis and his team's work could also help to improve electron microscope imaging. In an interview with NewScientist, he said electron microscope images are often "a little bit blurry. It’s not necessarily that they don’t have a good resolution; it’s because the electron is not sitting still at a specific point, right? It’s just making a cloud around the atoms.
"If we create electron microscopes using our attosecond electron pulses, then we have a sufficient resolution not only to see atoms in motion, which would be already an exciting thing but even how electrons jump among those atoms."
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