World's best metronome enables slow-motion pictures of atoms and molecules http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-world-metronome-enables-slow-motion-pict ures.html
Well, science is getting close to being able to do the definitive experiment which I asked for earlier in the year. They just have to overcome this problem: "With this short wavelength light pulses, it is possible to take flash photos of single molecules and atoms. However, the intense energy of each light pulse destroys the sample." And they are able to somewhat. "Therefore, the slow-motion movie production of a molecular process requires the repetition of the same process with a fresh sample and *each picture is taken a bit later*." Well, that's a good try, but not sure it's accurate enough to do what I need. unfortunately. *When* they can take a single hydrogen atom, suspend it in a vacuum (using a magnetic field?), and then take their 'flash photos' of it with an attosecond shutter speed, then we will know what an electron *really* is.. And they might also need to be able to cause a slight delay of the shutter, a number of times, to cause it to match the phase of the electron oscillation. The abstract for the peer-reviewed article is here: Optical flywheels with attosecond jitter http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2011.326.ht ml Abstract "It has been known for some time that the steady-state pulse propagating inside a mode-locked laser is the optical equivalent of a mechanical flywheel. By measuring the timing error spectrum between phase-locked optical pulse trains emitted from two nearly identical 10 fs Ti:sapphire lasers, we demonstrate a record low integrated timing error of less than 13 attoseconds, measured from d.c. to the Nyquist frequency of the pulse train, which is 41 MHz. This corresponds to the lowest high-frequency phase noise ever recorded of -203 dBc Hz-1 (assuming a 10 GHz carrier) for offset frequencies greater than 1 MHz. Such a highly uniform train of pulses will enable the synchronization of pump-probe experiments that measure the evolution dynamics of chemical and atomic processes evolving on femtosecond and attosecond timescales. The ultralow timing jitter of such pulse trains will also allow photonic analog-to-digital conversion of mid-infrared waveforms with a resolution of 6 bits." -Mark
