Attosecond imaging made possible by short and powerful laser pulses

Extremely short pulses of laser light with a peak power of 6 terawatts (6 trillion watts)—roughly equivalent to the power produced by 6,000 nuclear power plants—have been realized by two RIKEN physicists. This achievement ...

Attosecond

An attosecond is an SI unit of time equal to 10−18 of a second. (one quintillionth of a second). For context, an attosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 billion years, or twice the age of the universe.

The word "attosecond" is formed by the prefix atto and the unit second. Atto- was made from the Danish word for eighteen (atten). Its symbol is as.

An attosecond is equal to 1000 zeptoseconds, or 1/1000 of a femtosecond. Because the next higher SI unit for time is the femtosecond (10−15 seconds), durations of 10−17 s and 10−16 s will typically be expressed as tens or hundreds of attoseconds:

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