Brief reflections from a plasma mirror

When a dense sheet of electrons is accelerated to almost the speed of light, it acts as a reflective surface. Such a 'plasma mirror' can be used to manipulate light. Now an international team of physicists from the Max Planck ...

Laser physics: At the pulse of a light wave

Physicists in the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) have developed a novel type of detector that enables the oscillation ...

Ultra-short laser pulses control chemical processes

Specially shaped laser pulses can be used to change the state of electrons in a molecule. This process only takes several attoseconds—but it can initiate another, much slower process: The splitting of the molecule into ...

When nuclei catch up with electrons

In an attosecond study of the H2 molecule, physicists at ETH Zurich found that for light atomic nuclei, as contained in most organic and biological molecules, the correlation between electronic and nuclear motions cannot ...

Researchers demonstrate attosecond boost for electron microscopy

A team of physicists from the University of Konstanz and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany have achieved attosecond time resolution in a transmission electron microscope by combining it with a continuous-wave ...

Electron movements in liquid measured in super-slow motion

Electrons are able to move within molecules when they are excited from outside or in the course of a chemical reaction. For the first time, scientists have now succeeded in studying the first few dozen attoseconds of this ...

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