Slashdot Log In
Fastest-Ever Flashgun Captures Image of Light Wave
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:48 PM
from the fastest-flash-in-the-west dept.
from the fastest-flash-in-the-west dept.
loconet writes to tell us that a team of researchers have created the shortest-ever flash of light. Weighing in at just 80 attoseconds, this flash has already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse and could possibly be used in the future to capture the electron movement around large atoms.
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Fastest-Ever Flashgun Captures Image of Light Wave
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 175 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Light is a wave and a particle and therefore, a "wavicle".
Parent
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Ergo, test particles are "testicles"?
Parent
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:4, Funny)
You may not use mine for testing.....unless it's the latest adult gadget and the researchers are hot women.
Layne
Parent
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Would that be the famous double-slit experiment?
Parent
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Ergo, test particles are "testicles"?
No, he was a famous ancient Greek philosopher.
Parent
Re:Who woulda thought? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Duckhunt (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Duckhunt (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Duckhunt (Score:5, Funny)
One's a sick duck and... I can't remember how it ends, but your mother's a whore.
Parent
Re:Duckhunt (Score:5, Funny)
At which point she laughs?
Parent
Re:Duckhunt (Score:5, Funny)
My girlfriend tells a joke about ducks. It goes:
"What's the difference between a grape and a duck?"
Answer: "Both are purple, except for the duck."
Yeah, it's stupid, but I laugh, and then she has sex with me.
Parent
Sounds impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Using light to take pictures of light in motion?
This is either a hoax, or the the article is skipping some really important part.
Yep, it's hoax. (Score:5, Funny)
It is a hoax. see the picture of the light pulse? Well, for one, it's only showing a wave and we all know from physics that light is both a wave and and particle. So where's the particle? Hmmm?
Secondly, the wave is, well, wavy. And we know, again from physics, that light only travels in a straight line.
Those damn scientists always trying to fool us! And engineers too!
Parent
Re:Sounds impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
from TFA, I believe it's imaging a laser pulse shot through neon gas. It's the laser pulse that triggered the flash in the first place.
Bizarrely, the article states
I agree that snapping a photo of light sounds dubious, but it looks like an electron flash, so maybe it's just making something visible that wouldn't have been seen otherwise.
Parent
P.E.T.A will be pissed (Score:1, Funny)
a captured atom is an unhappy atom?
Um... What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, Internet Physicists out there, please help me.
Ok, first you have this coherent photon beam. This means that they are all traveling at the same direction. So how do you take a picture of THAT?
You are bombarding the photon beam with photons, are the photons opaque, reflective, or TRANSPARENT? How do the photons from the flash, BOUNCE BACK at the camera. When they bounce back, how do you get color?
Is it just me, or does this make any sense at all?
Re:Um... What? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Um... What? (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, first you have this coherent photon beam. This means that they are all traveling at the same direction. So how do you take a picture of THAT?
In a different way that a standard photograph.
You are bombarding the photon beam with photons,
No, you aren't. That doesn't make sense.
What they do is have the laser pulse travel through something they call a "chirped mirror". This packs the photos from the laser pulse into a smaller space. This then travels through a neon cloud, which then creates a flash of light. This flash of light is the "shortest-ever flash of light".
To photograph this flash of light, they direct it into a second neon cloud, which ionizes atoms, releasing electrons. Those electrons are then recorded. Multiple flashes were required to produce enough electrons to build up the image shown in the article, so what you really have is an image of many flashes overlaid.
Parent
Re:Um... What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks, but I think there is something I have hopelessly never figured out, and that something would also let me understand how reflection works. How does an atom know the direction that the photon was traveling and and what does it bump off of? And isn't the atom round, so how come reflection works like the atoms are a plane. And how does the atom know the relative position of the atoms around it, so that it can reflect the photon in the right direction?
This is also the problem with lenses. How does the atom know the surface of the greater object, so that it knows what directions to send the photons that are passing through?
I am sure if I understood this, it would make the underlying question here easier. But as many of these answers so far show, this is be far, not a trivial question.
Parent
Re:Um... What? (Score:5, Interesting)
That thought train led him to do some fundamental work in particle scattering and path integrals, IIRC, and eventually to the Feynman diagrams that are now commonly used to describe some aspects of particle interactions.
So you're thinking some good deep thoughts there, but I can't give you a good answer other than "they just know". Basically the "proper" reflection is the only one that is coherent to the observer and the other reflected beams are all out of phase so they might as well not happen... and therefore they don't. Or something like that.
Parent
Re:Um... What? (Score:4, Funny)
God dammit, now what's the answer? Why are the building edges sharp?
Feynman would never have left me hanging like that.
Parent
Re:Um... What? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
FLASH! Ahhhhh (Score:3, Funny)
Savior of the universe!
What about shutter speed? (Score:1)
Can't you just illuminate something brightly for any length of time when taking a picture?
Isn't shutter speed the problem?
Someone educate me.
Re:What about shutter speed? (Score:5, Informative)
Consider a 35mm film camera with a mechanical shutter... what degree of force and mechanism would be required to move that shutter to open AND close the height of 24mm in 80 attoseconds? IANAPhysicist, but I doubt human hands could hang on to it.
Apparently we're not realizing just how short 80 attoseconds is. You doubt human hands could hang on to it? Moving 24mm in 80 attoseconds is faster than the speed of light. Not only is it faster than the speed of light, it's a million times faster than the speed of light.
Light only travels 24 nanometers in 80 attoseconds. [google.com]
Parent
Re:What about shutter speed? (Score:5, Informative)
Or people who don't like to have their search results artificially curtailed by someone else's sense of unreasonable morality.
Parent
That's nothing... (Score:2)
I have a flashlight that will shoot a beam out in 1 nottasecond. Also, imagine the stop-motion sports photos you could get with 80-attosecond film speed!
Ummm.. (Score:5, Funny)
I hate to be a pedantic killjoy, but on that film the light flash lasted about 3 seconds. I could see it pretty well with my naked eye.
Try again, science!
Electron movement? (Score:3, Funny)
Does anybody else see the problem here?
Just in time for the wedding (Score:2)
I am SO going to use this in a speech about my cousin's wedding night when we throw his stag next week. "Fast, you say? I'll tell you about fast..."
Yeah, but ... (Score:2)
Dare I say it? (Score:1)
Perspective: (Score:2)
Bender (Score:1)
Ah, sweet photons.... I don't know if you're waves or particles, but you sure do go down smooth.
Doomsday for Schrodinger's Cat Solved? (Score:2)
"and could possibly be used in the future to capture the electron movement around large atoms."
I like Einstein, never like the idea of superposition. The cat will die when factors cause it to die. It does not flip between dead and alive in a box.
But I suppose quantum theorists will say that by observing the location of the electron it is also changing it, that had it not been measured it'd be somewhere else, thus proving black is white.
typical amature photography (Score:1)
hmm, looking at the pic I would say they forgot the anti-shake setting
Flash of Light? (Score:2)
Longer (Score:1)
Doing the math (Score:2)
Does that mean... (Score:1)
that I will finally be able to take a picture of a woman, talking on the phone to a friend, having her mouth _shut_? (provided that I dim the lights so the flash will do its work) Will 80 attoseconds be enough for this?
The previous record breakers... (Score:1)
have a better explanation of the generation of high harmonics
http://www.atto.fysik.lth.se/ [fysik.lth.se]
That looks familiar (Score:1)
and the light in my head flashed faster (Score:1, Offtopic)
Don't know why I thought of it, but as soon as I saw the imaging I thought of Clive Barkers Weaveworld novel. Maybe magic isn't actually magic, and there are reasons, and scientific ones, that people have certain insight that others can't fathom. I definitely don't want to be one of those whack jobs that think the Earth is still flat, but things like this and string theory always keep me wondering if the guy down the street doing LSD and pulling down his pants all the time was really crazy or just had a different sense of perception.
And then he asked her... (Score:1)
Was it good for you too??
Wow... I thought "wave" was simplified description (Score:1)
I hope you guys can forgive me on this, but it never occurred to me that they literally look like that. I always thought that the "waves" were too numerous and dense and the best way to describe it was to say they were waves. Thinking that was the layman's explanation and the actual scientific description was much more complicated.
Re:Taking a picture of a laser beam and using flas (Score:4, Funny)
Because it's there. Well.. no... I mean it's "there", now. Oh. I mean by now it's all the way over there...
Dang! You know what I mean!
Parent
Re:Taking a picture of a laser beam and using flas (Score:4, Funny)
He wanted a cool desktop background... BTW is there a link to a high resolution picture of that that would make a cool desktop background.
Parent
Re:But... (Score:2)
Well, now we've seen it.
How fast did you say it was going?
Parent
Re:But... (Score:1)
Parent
Re:Another possible use... (Score:2)
Simply not enough African political humor here on Slashdot. Could be wittier, though.
Parent