Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded To 3 Scientists for Illuminating How Electrons Move (nytimes.com) 30
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier on Tuesday for their experiments that "have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules." From a report: Electrons move at a whopping 43 miles a second. This speed long made them impossible to study. The new experimental techniques created by the three scientist-laureates use short light pulses to capture an electron's movement at a single moment in time. Think of a rotating fan at its highest speed: each blade is a blur. But if you point a strobe light at the fan, every flash will illuminate a frozen moment in time. As the flashes get shorter, more information about the fan is revealed.
To study the movement of electrons, the scientists had to use pulses of light that last an attosecond. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. The number of attoseconds in a single second is the same as the number of all the seconds that have elapsed since the universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes. Eva Olsson, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a news conference on Tuesday that attosecond science "allows us to address fundamental questions" such as the time scale of the photoelectric effect, the release of electrons from a material when light shines on it. Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of this effect. Accessing the ultrafast world of electron motion may also lead to advances in electronic circuitry, drug design and the materials used for batteries.
To study the movement of electrons, the scientists had to use pulses of light that last an attosecond. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. The number of attoseconds in a single second is the same as the number of all the seconds that have elapsed since the universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes. Eva Olsson, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a news conference on Tuesday that attosecond science "allows us to address fundamental questions" such as the time scale of the photoelectric effect, the release of electrons from a material when light shines on it. Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of this effect. Accessing the ultrafast world of electron motion may also lead to advances in electronic circuitry, drug design and the materials used for batteries.
Paywall (Score:5, Informative)
whopping 43 miles a second (Score:2)
Thats not that fast. Comets can move faster than that
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Whopping is just at the middle of the scale for newspaper adjectives. They have a lot of them because they are always padding word count with useless adjectives that add nothing to the story.
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How fast is that measured in Olympic-sized swimming pools?
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It equals about 25,800 olympic swimmers in combined speed. A speed of about 1,384 olympic sized swimming pool lengths per second.
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Don't know. But it's 416,102,459.571 f/fn*.
Approximately.
*furlongs per fortnight
Re: whopping 43 miles a second (Score:3)
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Whopping is just at the middle of the scale for newspaper adjectives
"Whopping" means "mildly disappointing". It has changed meaning in 1957 when Burger King introduced the 9-oz Whopper which, while definitely too much for anybody's health, is still only 9 oz and not terribly worthy of the name "whopper".
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.02% of the speed of light sounds much slower.
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Their orbital frequency is a bit smaller though.
Congratulations! (Score:2)
Until I know otherwise, I'll go out on a limb and assume they deserved it.
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It sounds like the super flash camera frames that watch a beam of light travel down a block of clear plastic. Except those are timed frames capoturing different light pulses at diffent locations, assembled into a movie.
Here, if they tried to measure an electron in an atomic orbit, will subsequent frame measurements be meaningful? Isn't that measurement jist doing an RNG on location, so to speak?
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You mean the thing with 3 one thousandths of a complication rate, and about 5% of that of a death rate, over hundreds of millions of doses?
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Re:Other winners of the Nobel Prize (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting (Score:3)
An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. The number of attoseconds in a single second is the same as the number of all the seconds that have elapsed since the universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes.
Which led me to doing some googling, since I love thinking about crazy small and crazy big numbers, especially when related to time and space. I ended up here, reading about zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds, with Planck time being mentioned. I have zero clue as to why this fascinates me so much, but it does. [bbc.co.uk]
Quick, somebody give me the number of zeptoseconds since the Big Bang!
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If you stopped the Planck clock for 13.8 billion years nobody would even know.
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Each blade is NOT a blur (Score:2)
Blur is a side effect of shutter speed on cameras.
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Have you never looked at a fan?
43 miles per second (Score:2)
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That said, you probably misunderstood what the prof meant when he confusingly tried to teach you the wave/particle duality of the electron and its behavior of changing from one orbital of an atom to another.
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I only have a superficial understanding of it, but electrons have a momentum operator [wikipedia.org] from which velocity can be derived by dividing by the mass. Not classical velocity or momentum. Yeah, I don't get it either. That's what they say about quantum mechanics.\
It was proved more than a hundred years ago that electrons don't orbit like planets, otherwise they would radiate away their orbital energy and fall into the nucleus.
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Einstein didn't discover the photo-electric effect (Score:5, Informative)
he explained it. It had been known for a long time.