(Newser)
– It seems shorter than a millisecond, shorter than a nanosecond, and shorter than a summer when you’re a child – it’s a zeptosecond, a unit used to measure the short intervals of time recorded by scientists. Zeptosecond is the trillionth of a second bill or 20 zeros per live science and one decimal point after one. German researchers say they used zeptoseconds to watch how a particle of light quickly moves toward a single atom of hydrogen, NBC reports. The researchers used Petra III particle acceleration to drive two electrons out of the atom. The journey of light from one electron to another took 247 zeptoseconds.
“When we knew the spatial target of a hydrogen atom, the photon landed on the first, and when it landed on the second hydrogen atom, we used the interference of two electron waves precisely,” said co-author Goethe University researcher Sven Grundman. A study published in the journal Science. The researchers said their technique would be useful for more complex experiments by looking at “different ultrafast processes”. This Independent Note that in 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zevai won the Nobel Prize with research using ultrafast lasers to measure how quickly atoms can change shape. He used femtoseconds – tens of millions of billionths of a second, which is equal to one million zeptoseconds. (Read more science fiction stories.)
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