Shortest Time Ever Measured
German physicists took a molecule of hydrogen a fired an x-ray photon at it. After a bit of analyzing they figured out how long it takes the photon to travel from one atom to another. Just 247 zeptoseconds.
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay
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The Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail got the Nobel prize in 1999 for measuring the speed at which molecules change shape. With that, he created a completely new scientific field – femtochemistry – which works with ultra-short laser beams. With them, it can measure things in the femtosecond range which are times in which chemical bonds create and dissolve.
Now it’s 2020 and a team of physicists led by Reinhard Dörner from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt decided to look further than just femtoseconds. In their breakthrough study, they measured the time a photon needs to fly over a distance which equals a hydrogen molecule. It takes just 247 zeptoseconds or 247 sextillionths of a second. This is the shortest period of time we ever measured.
So, how did such an experiment look like? The scientists used an H2 hydrogen molecule which had x-ray laser beams shot at then from an x-ray laser source PETRA III in the German research institute DESY in Hamburg. They set the x-ray’s energy so that one x-ray photon “kicks out” both of the electrons out of the molecule.
The electrons behave as both particles and waves. And the photon – in this case – acts as like flat stone when skipping it on water. The result is a very specific kind of interference that can be analyzed. Dörner’s team used a special device - COLTRIMS reaction microscope – for this purpose. This device is capable of visualizing ultra-fast processes in atoms and molecules and it can also say how exactly the hydrogen molecule is oriented in space.
When the researchers know the orientation of the hydrogen molecule then from the interference they were capable to deduce when exactly was the first electron “kicked out” compared to the second electron. The results show it takes 247 zeptoseconds. Dörner adds, that for the first time, we observed that the electron shell doesn’t react to the light-beam in a single moment of time. The tiny delay is caused by the information only being able to move at the speed of light.
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